"Webcams are now a six-billion-dollar industry, but it all started 30 years ago when some Cambridge University computer science researchers were sick of finding their coffee pot empty... When Dr. Quentin Stafford-Fraser hooked up the world’s first webcam in 1991, it was to check whether the coffee had finished brewing at Cambridge's computer science lab..." https://www.pcmag.com/news/in-search-of-hot-coffee-these-geeks-created-the-worlds-first-webcam
