A new series of public lectures on information technology kicks off on Wednesday with a talk by Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser, one of the people behind the legendary Trojan Room coffee pot.

If you’re not familiar with the legend, it runs like this. In 1991, a group of bright young things in the Cambridge University computer lab, got fed up with negotiating ancient stairs and corridors to the Trojan Room where the coffee pot sat, only to find that it was empty. So they pointed a video camera at the pot and wrote a program which would take a frame grab every few seconds which anyone in the lab could then display in the corner of their screen, enabling researchers anywhere in the building to know when there was fresh java* available.

In those days, primitive web browsers (such as they were) could only support text but a couple of years later, the Mosaic browser enabled images to display on pages and suddenly anyone in the world could see the Trojan Room coffee pot. It was arguably the world’s first ever webcam. To computer geeks of a certain age, that coffee pot has near mythic status. There is, naturally, a website all about it.

Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser

But Quentin Stafford-Fraser did far more than watch coffee brew. Over the years he has held research posts at Cambridge University, Xerox EuroPARC, Olivetti Research, and AT&T Labs. He also helped to develop the VNC software which is now installed on millions of machines worldwide.

This talk, entitled ‘Innovation and Re-innovation: building technologies and technology companies’, forms the first in a series of ‘Connected World’ public lectures organised by our IT Services. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, takes place in the Frank and Katherine May Lecture Theatre, in the Henry Wellcome Building, at 5.30pm on Wednesday 25 January 2012.

NB. If you like your astronomy as much as your computer science, you can make a double bill of it by following this with Dr John Bridges’ public lecture on Exploring Mars in the Rattray Theatre at 6.30pm.

*Coffee, not the programming language, which wasn’t invented until 1995.