The footage was horrific, though it could have been far, far worse. Recently, a surfer in Cabarita, Northern NSW, was viciously flung off his board by a large shark , then lunged at again, before miraculously paddling to shore with body and board unscathed. It wasn’t surprising that a webcam captured the viral footage. It’s a safe bet to say the researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, including Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, back in 1991 couldn’t have foreseen this near-death experience being broadcast. The pair had got tired of walking to the “Trojan Room”, one of the main computer labs, only to find the coffee pot empty. They pointed a camera at the pot and wrote custom software, so the image could be displayed on everyone’s screens in the office. The grainy grayscale image, updated at about one frame per second, ran on the internal university mainframe.…