Quentin Stafford-Fraser

James Quentin Stafford-Fraser is a computer scientist and entrepreneur based in Cambridge, England. He was one of the team that created the first webcam: the Trojan room coffee pot: Quentin pointed a camera at the coffee pot and wrote the XCoffee client program which allowed the image of the pot to be displayed on a workstation screen. When web browsers gained the ability to display images, the system was modified to make the coffee pot images available over HTTP and thus became the first webcam.[1]

Quentin Stafford-Fraser
NationalityBritish
OccupationComputer scientist
Known forTrojan room coffee pot
Websitequentinsf.com

Quentin wrote the original VNC client (viewer) and server for the Windows operating system, while at the Olivetti Research Laboratory.[2]

He is a regular public speaker and his work has attracted significant media coverage.[3]

Quentin is also a part-time Research Associate at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab . In 2013 he was a member of the winning team on Christmas University Challenge, representing Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.

The famous coffee pot

Companies founded

Quentin has founded or co-founded various companies and other organisations including:

  • Newnham Research (now DisplayLink)
  • Exbiblio
  • The Ndiyo project[4]
  • Telemarq Ltd (of which he is currently CEO)

Earlier history

Quentin was educated at Haileybury before studying Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and in 1989 became the first Cambridge college Computer Officer, at his old college, Gonville and Caius, before joining the Systems Research Group in the University's Computer Lab. Quentin is credited with operating the first web-server in the University of Cambridge, in 1992.

He created the Brightboard Interactive Whiteboard project [5] at Xerox EuroPARC in Cambridge, as part of his Ph.D thesis.[6]

gollark: Ah, so make it use horrible C error handling & stagger on when an error occurs?
gollark: Define them as regexes for maximum !!FUN!!.
gollark: `load`?
gollark: Although adding eval for most stuff *may* make it run slow.
gollark: C programmers will love it.

References
  1. "Trojan Room Coffee Pot resources at Cambridge University Computer Lab".
  2. Tristan Richardson; Quentin Stafford-Fraser; Kenneth R. Wood; Andy Hopper (Jan–Feb 1998). "Virtual Network Computing". IEEE Internet Computing. 2 (1): 33–39. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.17.5625. doi:10.1109/4236.656066.
  3. "Talks and interviews".
  4. "Splitting the digital difference". The Economist (Technology Quarterly). Third Quarter 2006.
  5. Stafford-Fraser, Q. & Robinson, P. (1996). "BrightBoard: A Video-Augmented Environment". CHI96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in Computing Systems.
  6. Stafford-Fraser, Quentin (April 1997). "Video-Augmented Environments". University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Technical Reports.
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