Necessity is the mother of invention
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Thanks to a couple of programmers their love for coffee future historians can now build a direct time line from colonialism to e-girls.
FYI : Kodak patented the digital camera in 1975 but film and paper were too profitable
If you step back and look at every company out there, we could probably either determine they have no purpose to the greater good of humanity or they chose to ignore a new invention because they are not even close to done making money on the current one. Could you imagine where we’d be if we progressed on improving a technology because it was a better option?
Capitalism sucks. It sucks for the planet.
But hey, I made 5 trillion dollars on a stock today, so there’s that /s
20+ years ago Colgate bought and shelved a patent for an antibacterial mouthwash that only targeted bacteria that erode enamel.
"We can't sell this shit... It will put us and the entire dentistry profession under"
There was even an entire standards document drawn up (as a practical joke), called the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP 1.0). To this day though, there the server status response 418 - I'm a teapot still exists. It was defined as part of HTCPCP as the error code returned when you tried to get a teapot to brew coffee :)
Web nerds took their coffee seriously! Or maybe they didn't? Does doing up an entire standards document as an april fools joke count as serious or unserious?
Humorous RFCs and protocol proposals are an ancient internet tradition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_Request_for_Comments
Engineering humour of this sort actually goes back even further -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator
Nerdy humour has probably been around as long as there have been engineers.
Learning about computer science and finding all the subtle jokes embedded in the naming conventions is peak. These nerds had humor!
Geeking out over the origins of HTTP 418 kinda got me a job once. But that was back when that kind of stuff, connecting interpersonally with the humans that you work with, mattered during hiring.
connecting interpersonally with the humans
You could've stopped right there and it would've still made sense, which is sad.
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"most world changing technologies were made because an Engineer was lazy!!!!"
-Bill Gates, probably
Not far off tbf
I have a camera aimed at my stove so I can check if I accidentally left the stove on. It never happens but it does give me peace of mind whenever I leave the hoose and get paranoid.
You know I replaced that with a static image years ago, right?
Yea, but the image was goatse, so we knew pretty quick who did what.
whenever I leave the hoose
Canadian, eh?
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"Coffee" was also the name of the first OnlyFans model to use a Webcam.
Oh I like this. It's on the cusp of being fake or fact. I'm never going to fact check and I don't want to know.
Sorry but webcams are older than OF. There would have been many OF models that were already doing webcamming.
Nah but it was the first OF person. There was Chaturbate and other webcam platforms prior but not OF. So Coffee was the first OF. It's a fact.
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Isn't that also where "HTTP 418: I'm a teapot" came from?
Though that could have been a reference, iirc that was an unrelated April fools RFC that was filed as a partial complaint people were creating overly specific http status codes
So it wasn't porn?
1991-2001... Holy shit, this coffee pot has a longer lifespan than most Google products!
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I don't understand why they don't just accept free walks
Lol, found a non dev
If it was physical I'd understand. As an engineer I'll takr any excuse to build something. But I also need my boss off my ass about taking another walk, I can't think sitting still
The Trojan Room coffee pot camera existed before the web existed. Before the web it was a client/server protocol on a local network. They only made it into a webcam after the web was invented and started supporting images.
What I remember is that when the first web browsers capable of displaying images were launched, people found a way to sample a single frame from a camera and load it into an image tag to get an extremely slow frame rate camera. People had been trying to make video calling a thing since the 1960s, and I think the first "webcams" were new attempts to demonstrate that. They basically came out at the same time as XCoffee being available on the Internet, but they had more publicity behind them. IMO, what made the coffee pot special was that it was so clearly useless to everybody except a few people in a lab in Cambridge. It was revolutionary that bandwidth and camera hardware was so cheap that someone could allow anybody on the planet to just check out the level of their coffee machine on demand at any time.
Too much tech for me, I alway French Press my coffee on the go in a more ecologic way.
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You can/could also find Coffee HOWTO in your distro's HOWTO package. (I found a reference back to v0.5 of the document in 1998.)
Has simple schematics to get you started for the hardware, using the parallel port to toggle relays.
It's a very neat little document, and inspired me to write a simple kernel module so I could echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/whatever/coffee0 to turn pin 0 high on the parallel port. (This is silly, and it's much easier to just do things in user space!)
Lol, criticism of the turning machine.
I just love those old OS designs. Mostly Windows 3.11 and AmigaOS 3.2
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Just use a laser and the surface refracting properties of water, like any hacker?
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