The webcam was originally designed to do what?

In 1991, the webcam was originally designed to monitor a coffee pot. In a place called "The Trojan Room", it had a coffee pot for use by office employees. It was a specific coffee machine that was located next to the so called Trojan Room in the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England. This became the location that would provide inspiration for the world's first webcam.

To save the employees in the building from the disappointment of finding their coffee machine empty, after making a trip to the Trojan Room, a camera was set up. This provided a live picture of the coffee pot to all desktop computers connected with the agency (business) network. After the camera was connected to the Internet a few years later, the coffee pot gained international notoriety. As a feature of the fledgling World Wide Web, it lasted as a source of inventiveness until it was retired in 2001.

Today in 2018, webcams are used by many people to be their computers’ eye on the world. There is a surprising amount of things that webcams can do. They can: control media and games, make stop motion videos, take time lapse photo sequences, set up private surveillance, take fun pictures, set up a photo booth for a party, help create a photo/video library, play motion games, or even login and unlock computers.