What was the first scientific data set that was used over the internet?

Huh? I’m a native English speaker, but for some reason I can never seem to decipher your humor!
I have heard from numerous sources, including geeks and historians, that the internet expanded in order for porn to be downloaded online. ;)

Statistical data about the average amount of porn on the scientists’ computers on the network.

Wasn’t one of the first web cams looking at a coffee pot in a lab someplace? Researchers could tell when the pot was full – while they were looking at porn.

Ok, this iteration makes more sense…

In the early days of the internet (BITNET, bang notation routing, for those who remember) it was only a scientific tool and it was used only by a few highly select universities in the USA. MIT,UCLA, Utah, etc. Back in those days the internet was used primarily for things like electrical engineering, telecommunications research, and some of the very hard sciences. It’s hard to know what the first research was, but one can safely assume it was serious scientific research on something electronic.

This article from BBC Technology says the first webcam was at the University of Cambidge.

“As computer geeks at the University of Cambridge beavered away on research projects at the cutting edge of technology, one piece of equipment was indispensable to the entire team – the coffee percolator. One of the things that’s very, very important in computer science research is a regular and dependable flow of caffeine,” explains Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser.
But the problem for scientists was that the coffee pot was stationed in the main computer lab, known as the Trojan room, and many of the researchers worked in different labs and on different floors.”
“To solve the problem, he and another research scientist, Dr Paul Jardetzky, rigged up a camera to monitor the Trojan room coffee pot. The camera would grab images three times a minute, and they wrote software that would allow researchers in the department to run the images from the camera on their internal computer network.”

No doubt, this enabled them check the coffee pot without having to zip up.

I think that the internet discovered porn rather than vice versa.

The first data set was the phone number sent by the hot female undergrad lab assistant to the ultra good looking and rich but not too bright male grad student whose dad funded a research project.

When I worked for the University, we estimated 80% of the traffic over the internet was porn or porn related. the rest was spam.

“Developed economies make increasing use of data-intensive technologies.
There are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide and there are between 1 billion and 2 billion people accessing the internet.[5]
Between 1990 and 2005, more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class which means more and more people who gain money will become more literate which in turn leads to information growth.
The world’s effective capacity to exchange information through telecommunication networks was 281 petabytes in 1986, 471 petabytes in 1993, 2.2 exabytes in 2000, 65 exabytes in 2007[15] and it is predicted that the amount of traffic flowing over the internet will reach 667 exabytes annually by 2013.[5] “
Quoted from Wikipedia online website:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data

It makes you wonder how the Ancients did it?
Inventories would have been the first data set?
In those days they did have Bakery,markets,lifestock to count and manage etc
Even the Bible was catagorized.
It all had to start somewhere .