Tag: cambridge

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Ancient Web: Alex Churchill Left His Student Homepage Online and Admitted It Was Out of Date

Alex Churchill’s old homepage opens with purple sheep, an elephant on a pogo stick, a reversed e-mail invitation, and an offer to take an armadillo.

Nobody can accuse it of withholding personality.

Visit Alex Churchill’s old homepage

Churchill later added an unusually useful warning: the website is very out of date, many images are missing, most pages have not been updated for years, and his interests changed.

Then he left it online.

That decision turned an obsolete homepage into a much better historical artifact.

A person, not a profile

The site comes from Churchill’s student years at Cambridge and sprawls across exactly the categories personal homepages once encouraged people to invent for themselves.

There are collections of strange things said by mathematics and computer-science lecturers. There are years of quotes from friends. There are pages about Christianity, the Cambridge Assassins’ Guild, Diplomacy, Magic: The Gathering, the Odd Squad, computer games, silly songs, photographs, and a Diplomacy variant set in Cambridge.

At one point Churchill explains that he built Linux shell scripts to search Magic card rulings.

Elsewhere he lists games he loved, including Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VIII, StarCraft, Civilization, Mario 64, UFO: Enemy Unknown, and Worms.

None of this has been compressed into a professional biography.

That is why it works.

Modern social profiles encourage a continuous present: the old post slides down, the avatar changes, the current self replaces the previous one. A static personal homepage can accidentally preserve an entire obsolete version of a person.

Churchill’s page openly acknowledges that condition rather than fixing it.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes personal pages because they preserve a form of web authorship that was less concerned with consistency and much more willing to be weird in public.

This homepage is outdated.

That is now its best feature.

Return to Alex Churchill’s old homepage

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Ancient Web: The Coffee Pot That Became a Webcam

Long before webcams became background furniture, a group at the University of Cambridge pointed a camera at a coffee pot because walking down the hall to find an empty pot was apparently too much wasted effort.

Visit the Trojan Room Coffee Machine page

The page that survives is wonderfully matter-of-fact about the whole thing. A video capture board in an Acorn Archimedes grabbed one frame every second. The machine JPEG-encoded the image, and the Web server requested frames through an RPC mechanism developed in the Computer Laboratory.

The coffee pot itself was already being watched before Cambridge had a World Wide Web server. Once the Web arrived, the local convenience hack became something much larger: people outside the building could check the status of a coffee machine they could not possibly drink from.

That is early Web culture in miniature.

A useful problem came first

Nobody started with a marketing plan for “live streaming.” There was coffee in another room. People wanted to know whether there was any left. A camera and network connection solved it.

The surviving page still explains the technical plumbing instead of polishing the story into legend. It mentions MSRPC2, MSNL, the Acorn Archimedes, JPEG encoding, and even the fact that the lights in the Trojan Room were not always switched on.

In November 1994, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire visited to report on the service. The lab did what a lab full of networked computers in 1994 would naturally do: connected a radio to a workstation, relayed the broadcast across the local network, recorded it digitally, and put that online too.

For a webmaster in 2026, the page is a nice reminder that memorable Web projects often begin with an extremely specific problem. The technology serves the thing. The thing does not exist merely to justify a technology stack.

This site came from the larger corpus we are working through for CacheRat’s Ancient Web project. The full list contains 1,967 old, technical, personal, institutional, and generally strange corners of the Web.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

The original coffee machine is no longer dispensing status reports to the Internet, but Cambridge kept the page and the explanation.

See the Trojan Room Coffee Machine page