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FRASIER’S FRIDAY FACT

Volume XXXI

9/29/17

Hello, my dear Friends.

I welcome you back to another installment of our weekly tradition, Frasier's Friday Fact. I'm sure that you all know by now that we gather here to cherish knowledge and continue to build our readily available mental database of useless information to use at parties.

As you may or may not know, today is another one of those (what I like to call) "silly holidays." However, today's silly holiday honors something very noble indeed - Coffee.

Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen, today is "National Coffee Day." Of course, I could write a novel of comparable length to a book from the A Song of Ice and Fire series on the wonders that coffee has done for me, let alone the wonders that it has done for humanity. But I certainly don't have time to write that, and I imagine you don't have time to read it either.

Instead, I will link coffee to something that you may not expect - the modern webcam. Yes, the idea of a live streaming video over the Internet evolved from a humble need for coffee in an office. At the University of Cambridge in 1991, computer engineers were tired of getting up to grab a cup of coffee from the office pot, only to find it empty. So, to solve the problem, one of the engineers set up a camera and write a program to show a live stream of the coffee pot at all times, available on the campus network. A few years later, the camera was connected to the Internet and the coffee pot stream was available worldwide. It became somewhat famous in the early days of the Internet, until it was shut down in 2001.

So, next time you are recording something stupid that no one probably cares about on Facebook Live or any of its clones, thank the almighty Coffee.

Stay caffeinated, my friends.

Fraish