Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.

And this week we're bringing you some programs from our archives which chart the breakthroughs in technology that have made it possible for millions of people

around the world to work from home.

In the early 1990s, the first webcam came into being.

It was invented by scientists working in Cambridge in the UK and its camera was trained on, of all things, a coffee pot.

In 2012, Rebecca Kessby spoke to some of the computer scientists who developed it.

It's late November 1991 and at Cambridge University's computer lab in Britain

scientists are bevering away on research projects at the forefront of computer technology.

The main lab is called the Trojan Room. Dr. Quentin Stafford Fraser worked there.

My memories of that room were there were two or three racks of computer, weren't they?

They were computers that slotted in almost like books in library shelves.

There were rows and rows of these sort of single board computers plugged into these shelves with cables

dangling all over the place and it was an amazing sort of spaghetti collection.

But there was one piece of equipment that all the scientists came to rely upon.

Yes, well, one of the things that's very, very important in computer science research

is to have a regular and dependable flow of caffeine.

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