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The Trojan Room coffee-pot camera is widely recognized as the first webcam, but its original feed is no longer running. It began as a local camera at the University of Cambridge in late 1991, went onto the web in November 1993, and was switched off on 22 August 2001. Some images survive: the British Film Institute (BFI) says 28 fragments recovered from Internet Archive captures form a visual record spanning 1998 to 2001. That is a record of known fragments used in one film, not a complete inventory of everything that may survive.
What was the first webcam?
The Trojan Room coffee-pot camera began in late 1991 as a practical fix for researchers at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. A camera pointed at the coffee pot so people could check whether coffee was available without walking to the room. Paul Jardetzky and Quentin Stafford-Fraser are credited with the original setup, which used a salvaged video camera, an old computer and a frame grabber. A local X-Windows client displayed the image at intervals. Cambridge’s timeline and Stafford-Fraser’s first-person history describe those early stages.
The camera became a web camera later. Daniel Gordon modified the system to respond to web requests, and Martyn Johnson worked with him to connect it to the web in November 1993. The important technical shift was that a browser could request an image from a server and receive a new image on each request. As Stafford-Fraser put it in 2001: “We soon realized something that now seems obvious: when your browser requests an image from a server, the server doesn’t have to return the same image every time.” Guinness World Records lists the device as the first webcam.
It is more precise to call it the first webcam than the world’s oldest continuously operating feed: the original camera stopped in 2001.
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When did the Trojan Room webcam stop working?
The historic camera’s last image was made at 10:54 on Wednesday, 22 August 2001. The Computer Laboratory was moving to a new building, and maintaining the system had become difficult. Cambridge’s shutdown account and Stafford-Fraser’s article give the date and context. The longest-serving coffee pot was sold at auction that August for £3,350, according to the Cambridge timeline.
Cambridge still has a technical page describing a coffee-pot service, including an Acorn Archimedes that captures one JPEG frame per second. That legacy service description is not evidence that the original webcam feed continued after 2001. Its historical shutdown is documented separately by Cambridge.
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Are images from the original webcam still available?
Yes, but only as a limited surviving record—not as a complete replay of the feed. BFI Replay says the camera transmitted millions of images, almost none of which were formally saved. Its record for Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s 2024 short film identifies 28 surviving image fragments found through Internet Archive captures. The film uses them to show the coffee pot between 1998 and 2001. The BFI’s film record is the source for both the count and the date span; it does not establish a total count of every surviving image.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesA web archive can preserve a page or capture selected content without recording every changing frame. The Library of Congress notes that its web-archiving program may be unable to collect some streamed third-party application content and other dynamic or interactive material in its web archiving FAQ. A saved page should therefore not be mistaken for a continuous recording of a live feed.
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How to archive a website before it disappears
If you are preserving your own website or material you have permission to save, treat a capture as one component of a preservation plan, not as a guaranteed complete copy. The Library of Congress recommends selecting what matters, exporting it with metadata, organizing descriptive files, keeping multiple copies in separate places, checking readability annually and refreshing media every five years or when needed. Its personal websites guidance includes portable hard drives as one possible medium for an additional copy.
Quick Recap
- Choose what matters. Identify the pages, linked material, images, and changing or interactive features that you want to preserve. A single page capture may not include a linked site or content that updates over time.
- Capture and export available material. Save the site or files using an appropriate archiving method, then export them in a form you can retain. Do not assume that a capture includes streamed or dynamic third-party content.
- Keep context with the files. Preserve metadata and create descriptive files that explain what the saved material is, where it came from, and when it was captured. That context helps make a collection understandable later.
- Make separated copies. Keep at least two copies in different locations. A portable hard drive can serve as one copy, but a second copy stored elsewhere reduces the risk that one failure or loss destroys the archive.
- Check and refresh the archive. Once a year, confirm that the files still open and are readable. Refresh the storage media every five years or when necessary, following the Library of Congress guidance.
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