Ephemeral

[Bharat Varma]

'The image was only updated about three times a minute,' recalled Quentin Stafford-Fraser, one of the researchers who helped set up the camera.
'But that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine because so was the coffee',
The camera stayed online until August 2001.

The xcoffee camera refreshed a few times a minute, giving researchers at the University of Cambridge, England, a 128

[Hankosaurus]

Hi Bharat.

Are there links to what this coffee camera is all about?  Really curious.  Would like to learn about it.

Happy Day.

[Thad E Ginathom]

It's a legend from the earliest days of computer networking.

[Bharat Varma]

Henry, I took this from an article on Dpreview about "Web Rot".
Those of us from the pre digital photography era would well understand what this "rot" is.

This link -
https://www.dpreview.com/opinion/0517674260/web-rot-is-erasing-our-images-and-videos

Hi Bharat.

Are there links to what this coffee camera is all about?  Really curious.  Would like to learn about it.

Happy Day.

The coffee camera saga is narrated here. (Appropriately enough, the original link to the page died).

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.html

[Thad E Ginathom]

/quote]

Thank you! Very interesting and thought provoking.

[pk5user]

Thanks a lot for sharing this Bharat.. Your original post looked flavourless initially on (my mistake not to delve deeper) which is very unlike 'Coffee' and then when i delved deeper into your link 'Web Rot' everything changed and i was all charged up without the help of caffiene :) Sorry about this but my post is going to be long since i feel implied/inspired to do so.

This reminds me of an outdoor adventure camp we did for kids recently and we chanced upon some graffiti written like 'I love you' and random names painted or scratched on some beautiful rock formations. We had a discussion about this and there were comparisons made about early man doing this on rocks aka "cave painting" and there was opinions on which of the writings on the rock was "art" and which wasn't and how one was done by people living harmoniously with nature and how the recent writings/disfiguration on the rocks were more about self-gratification and not art.
So is, i feel, how the world and societies look at what is to be safeguarded & preserved and what is not. But who's responsibility is it to decide what needs to be archived and what is not? Looking historically a lot of cultural objects, ideas, and horrifically - a mindboggling variety of nature as in life forms, and languages, scripts and peoples themselves are wiped out from history without a trace. And a lot is being lost as we converse, as the world is catapulting past at a speed which has little time to think about these things.

[Hankosaurus]

Thanks Bharat, Thad, and pk5user for the information and comments about the xcoffee camera.  I found the article about web rot to be very informative.  I guess I knew about it, but had never heard its name before.  Cambridge University should reinstall that coffee pot and put it online for historical purposes.  Haha.

I suppose that anything of importance that we dare to upload should be backed up locally. Twice.  One might wonder if some black and white negatives from 1900 might outlast the digital storage we trust so blindly.  I'm keeping my negatives, even though I have scanned a number of them.