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The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a coffee pot
- 0x456 5y agoBreakrooms also have a dark side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-oven-caused-mystery-signal-plaguing-radio-telescope-for-17-years https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...
- lapetitejort 5y agoImagine thinking you've discovered some mysterious signal that could herald the next Cosmic Microwave Background, only to discover impatient astronomers.
- asdff 5y agoWho knew my mother was right all along to scold me for opening the microwave before the timer went off
- beamatronic 5y agoDoes anyone else remember when you could "finger" the Coke machine?
- dividuum 5y agoTo those seemingly confused by this: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt
- jt2190 5y agoHere’s the man page for finger: https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger
- mrweasel 5y agoThat's fantastic, I miss those ideas and tools. Modern computers are boring, sterile and devoid of humour. I mean it's actually useful, a little overkill perhaps, but then again so is mounting Raspberry Pis on everything. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but computers aren't as fun as they used to be, and while much software is of lower quality, it's also much more complex.
- beamatronic 5y agoYou could probably make a modern cross-platform finger client using Electron!
- pugworthy 5y agoI used to run a website for a university research ship, and you could "finger" the ship when in port and get current meteorological and sea data (temp, salinity, etc.) finger -l ship@oldman.hmsc.orst.edu was the call. "oldman" was the Sun workstation running the ships data systems, and "lubber" was the one on my desk.
- atum47 5y agoI miss old internet so much.
- xtracto 5y agoBoingBoing (the source of this story) is one of those places that has withstood the test of time.
- rhacker 5y agoI think that's why we're on here so much.
- huhtenberg 5y agoThe sound of a modem handshake. The whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up. A vending machine on another uni's campus replying to your pings. Hum of a computer lab with the hollow of elevated floor under your feet. Those linen floppy sleeves. Using finger. Plan files. To each their own, obviously, but welcome to nostalgia.
- bitwize 5y agoFinger, .plan and .project, talk, email, netnews... Unix was social media.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoThe first internet connected toaster from 1990 https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_toast.htm https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_toast.htm
- mmmBacon 5y agoI recall those days and hard to fathom today why this was such a big deal. Was really hard to do anything like this back in those days.
- _boffin_ 5y agoWhat has not been done before may not be inherently difficult, but the creativity part is since it hasn't been done before.
- dls2016 5y agoI remember trying to use CU-SeeMe at some point in maybe 1995 but not ever doing so successfully. And sharing video was a PITA until YouTube, essentially.
- dboreham 5y agoI remember looking at the coffee cam and not thinking "wow, a live camera on the web" but rather "they pointed the camera at their coffee pot, that's weird". So the notion that someone would put a video camera feed on the internet was at the time completely uninteresting. Video over networks was a thing that had existed for years prior. That someone had written a script to frame-grab into a file that was underneath a server, accessible over the network, was not new or novel. I bet it had been done many times before. I think this is a good example of how history can be somewhat bogus. It makes a great story to say that the coffee pot cam was the world's first webcam, because a) the people involved wrote about it and b) a webcam is a thing we recognize today. But back then nobody would have thought of a thing called a webcam because while cameras on computers were not uncommon, they were quite expensive, and nobody (to a first approximation) had a connection fast enough to practically use them. Nobody really considered "the web" in the humanity-changing way that we see it today. People used Compuserve and AOL and the internet/web was possibly going to take off with regular folks, but who knew exactly how things were going to play out.
- comex 5y ago> So the notion that someone would put a video camera feed on the internet was at the time completely uninteresting. This is the most “future is already here – just not very evenly distributed” quote I’ve ever seen. :)
- romanhn 5y agoThis is just three years before Jennifer Ringley created the concept of a "camgirl" with JenniCam. The information superhighway, as it were, really was the wild, wild West in those days.
- adventurer 5y agoIn case anyone is curious, the domain now hosts camgirl porn.
- gostsamo 5y agoIsn't the original website cl.cam.ac.uk?
- gumby 5y agoI believe the first image broadcast over the ARPANET was in the 70s and was supposedly from a porn movie shot at the DC Powers building (home of the Stanford AI Lab). I remember being shown the alleged image which was far from racy given that it was only perhaps 200 x 200 pixels, and when viewed on a green-phosphor terminals with pixels about .5 mm across... A step from line printer ASCII overprint art, but not much better.
- rasz 5y agoJosh Harris was also active in Video broadcast scene at that time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Harris_(Internet) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Harris_(Internet) "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public Glorious train wreck, highly recommended watch. >art project "Quiet: We Live in Public," an Orwellian, Big Brother concept developed in the late '90s which placed more than 100 artists in a human terrarium under New York City, with myriad webcams following and capturing every move the artists made.[3] The pièce de résistance was a Japanese-style capsule hotel outfitted with cameras in every pod, and screens that allowed each occupant to monitor the other pods
- jeffbee 5y agoThe second one was the Netscape fish tank that you could watch by typing ctrl-alt-f.
- dentalperson 5y agoI mostly remember this because of the brief appearance in "Halt and Catch Fire", which captured the fascination of early webcams in a few seconds.
- Imnimo 5y agoNescafe is the mother of invention.
- alasdair_ 5y agoSure, if the invention is killing babies.
- gorgoiler 5y agoAhhh the Trojan Room: I remember when it was next to a genuine halide protected machine room, back when SunOS computers were more valuable than human life and info was a viable alternative to man.
- spindle 5y agoSince we're doing nostalgia: I could see the webcam and could even see through the window (or was it a glass wall?) into the Trojan Room but didn't have a key to get in :-(
- spargosto 5y agoCoffee makes the world go round
- eurasiantiger 5y agoIn some parts of the world, coffee has been an illegal drug. Imagine what some people would go through to get coffee if it became illegal now.
- spargosto 5y agoasdas
- kloch 5y agoI remember a sysadmin at my university showing the web version of this to me in spring 1994. This is back when there was no Internet in dorm rooms at most schools. You had to go to a computer lab to use native IP applications or dialin to a 2400 baud modem pool for telnet/shell server access (9600 baud if you were lucky).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- LeoPanthera 5y agoIt’s interesting that it was hosted on an Acorn Archimedes workstation, the first consumer product with an ARM chip inside it. (ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine.) They didn’t chose it for any technical reasons, it was just what they happened to have.
- hughrr 5y agoI used them for technical reasons. It was amazing what crap you could hang off a user port podule. At one point I had a home security system running off a limping A420. This was until the power supply exploded and nearly burned my house down when I was out. It was never replaced.
- quickthrower2 5y agoI have some memories from early 90s Archimedes running a cam at a computer show. Pretty amazing I think it was showing about a frame every 1 to 2 seconds
- ubicomp 5y agoOne of the earliest webcams is still around at MIT Media Lab! When I was there, I would use it to give away free food. It's installed in a corner of the lab facing down so you can place free objects under it. I would place free food under the webcam and press the broadcast button. It would send an image to various IRC channels and other subscribers. Within minutes, hungry lab folks would rush in to grab the food. Probably my favorite memory of being at the lab.
- will_walker 5y agoWhen I was there, there was a slack channel rebroadcasting the webcam feed providing desktop & mobile notifications. Based on the quality of the food in the feed, you could conjecture that funders were visiting for a meal, or when director-level staff meetings were occuring.
- hoseja 5y agoWebcam feed.
- liamwire 5y agoI remember reading about this maybe a few years ago, and it’s such a brilliant use.
- jalk 5y ago> The image was only updated about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee.” That made me laugh :-)
- jd3 5y agoLou Montulli's Fishcam, which was the second live webcam and a hidden easter egg in Netscape, is still up and running! https://www.fishcam.com/ https://www.fishcam.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishcam#Netscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishcam#Netscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli#Ongoing_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli#Ongoing_projects
- jmspring 5y agoFishCam was a requirement we put in when we moved to Zetta's offices near the Sunnyvale dump.
- jacquesm 5y agoSo, back in the day when I posted the very first 'livestream' straight to the browser I got a lot of flak from people who thought it was fake :)
- altacc 5y agoI wonder if this is related to the 418 "I'm a teapot" HTTP response code?
- dylan604 5y ago418s were issued if someone used the wrong pot. 410s were issued when someone did not return the coffee pot after a set time. 404s were issued after that. 403s were issued when someone from marketing tried to get coffee.
- Shatnerz 5y agoThe Trojan Room Coffee pot is mentioned in the RFC as an example. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324 edit: but I wouldn't say that it was the motivation
- anyfoo 5y agoI occasionally looked at the webcam, from my home in Germany, via modem. It's hard to bring across how incredible it felt to be able to see a coffee pot in far, far away USA in real time.
- barbs 5y agoI remember in the dial-up days finding a website with a live feed of a train set in some faraway part of the way. You could choose a train to make a circuit of the track by clicking a button. The delay was something like 10 seconds but it was absolutely thrilling to cause a remote effect and see it.
- eichin 5y agoWe had one at Cygnus - originally it was just a christmas tree and lights, controlled by... finger, I think? and then in later years web (and the train) was added. One year it made the new york times...
- ineedasername 5y agoI remember a christmas light site, maybe that was it! Though I also remember being skeptical, that it could all be static images that changed on a button push. It didn't ruin the magic though: at the time, even that would have been fairly cool.
- anthk 5y agoCygnus? The company from Cygwin?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- DoreenMichele 5y ago"It's a kind of magic."
- angrais 5y agoDo you mean UK? As the article (and first webcam) was Cambridge, UK?
- Namidairo 5y agoAn Australian ISP have had a webcam pointed at their coffee pot for a while too [1] It has persevered through a few coffee machines, cameras, corporate takeover and assimilation, so far. 1: http://looking-glass.iinet.net.au/coffee/history/ http://looking-glass.iinet.net.au/coffee/history/
- mastazi 5y agoWow that page with the history of all the changes over the years is such a good read :-) it almost makes me feel nostalgic even though I never worked there ahah thank you for sharing.
- fossuser 5y agoThere was an old rumor that the first internet e-commerce transaction was a bag of weed. I don’t remember the specifics though. I think it was between Stanford and MIT in 1971 or 1972, something like that. I probably read it in Hackers.
- pico303 5y agoThere was also one to keep an eye on the candy machine stock. Though talking about these early webcams makes me feel every pain and creak in my old joints.
- ajsharp 5y agoLol “keep an eye on” makes it sound like that coffee pot might step out of line and do something unexpected.
- kloch 5y agoAnyone remember the random camera page on xmission.com? https://user.xmission.com/~bill/randcamera.html https://user.xmission.com/~bill/randcamera.html It's still alive and has a list of mostly broken links
- mastazi 5y agoOh, it was an Olivetti camera <3 I remember when I was a kid and up to my teens (80's-90's) many more countries had their own national tech and people were understandably proud of it. I grew up in Italy hearing stories of how forward thinking Adriano Olivetti[1] was. It was a more diverse world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriano_Olivetti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriano_Olivetti
- keithnz 5y agointeresting, can't remember the exact dates, but in 91(possibly 92) when I was on IRC I used to talk with someone at washington state University who was doing a project on streaming video on the internet using SGI computers I think it was, technically not on the web though, and I can't remember much of the details.
- rasz 5y agoMight of been Global Schoolhouse project https://web.archive.org/web/20091213001309/http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Academia/GlobalSchoolhouseProject.html#The%20Global%20Schoolhouse https://web.archive.org/web/20091213001309/http://www.virtua... they experimented with satellite links before settling in on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe
- AKluge 5y agoMuch props to this guy, The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
- renewiltord 5y agoIt appears that almost all cool tech is invented for the purpose of minor comfort. I call this the Pepper Law. An example is that we invented almost all of navigation and trade so fat rich dudes could have tasty food. I find this a worthwhile reminder when people make smart-ass remarks about using tech to make some minor trivial frustration of someone go away. That’s where it all comes from.
- evv 5y agoAnother fun one: Here's a 'web cam' (refreshing image every 30s) to keep an eye on a light bulb which has been lit for over a century: https://www.centennialbulb.org/cam.htm https://www.centennialbulb.org/cam.htm
- ineedasername 5y agoWhat's their pricing model? As a SaaS, a freemium tier might be a useful enticement, but should probably be limited to 1 refresh/hour. Since it's mostly a single-use app the price after should be cheap: $1.99/month/seat for 15-minute refreshes, up to $6.99 for once a minute. I'm not sure how many tiers in between would be needed. An "enterprise" plan for large work groups could also offer the feature of assignment to a random user to refill the coffee pot when it neared empty status. I'm sure there's more details to work out, but the addressable market size here seems huge. Basically every single business with shared coffee pots. However, most problematically, the first-mover in this space would have to figure out an effective moat.
- stakkur 5y agoThis guy fucks.
- jqcoffey 5y agoAh fond memories of my roommate and I (circa 1997) hacking together a webcam of an RC car in our backyard. It involved me writing some sort of perl script to pipe the low-res jpegs dumped from god knows what camera to I honestly can't remember what sort of web resource (maybe I transcoded the jpegs into an endless streaming GIF?) and my roommate doing the dirty work of bit-banging some kind of rs-232 connected servos to wire the remote up to the server (which I then hooked up via some perl scripts to our webpage). I think we made Slashdot. We ran this off of one of the first batch of cable modems available in San Diego at the time and well, as I recall it, all of a sudden the car just starts moving all over the place freakishly and then we lost all connectivity. Fun times!
- misterkrabs 5y agoHow many times do I have to hear this? lol
- seizethecheese 5y agoAs founder and CEO of a YC company that is focused on coffee monitoring devices, I'll choose to believe that this is a good omen. Clearly coffee is a ripe place to start when building new tech!
- wombatmobile 5y agoWorld's longest lab experiment still going strong, via webcam In 1927, a physics professor named Thomas Parnell launched an experiment on viscous liquids. 85 years later, we're still waiting for his results. It all began with a funnel, a beaker, and some melted tar pitch. Parnell, a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, was hoping to demonstrate that brittle tar pitch actually behaves as a liquid when kept at room temperature. To prove this, he melted some tar pitch, let it cool for three years, and placed it within the funnel, held over the beaker. The first drop rolled down the funnel eight years later. The second came nine years after that. By the time the third rolled around, Parnell had already passed away. https://www.engadget.com/2012-01-27-worlds-longest-lab-experiment-still-going-strong-via-webcam.html https://www.engadget.com/2012-01-27-worlds-longest-lab-exper...
- dx034 5y agoAs the website has no link to the stream, here's the website to follow the next drop: http://thetenthwatch.com/ http://thetenthwatch.com/
- rcarmo 5y agoI remember this vividly, watched it on my NeXT. I found it highly amusing to later find Quentin doing VNC (and later DisplayLink), and follow his blog to this day.
- xtiansimon 5y agoOne of the most impressive webcam transformations, IMHO, is from the BurningMan project. I recall the burn was first broadcast about 1999, when I was on playa, and I remember trying to watch in 2001 when I was not able to attend. The image was tiny, low bit rate, and buggy. Compare that to 2011 onward. It’s like night and day. https://burningman.org/?s=Webcam https://burningman.org/?s=Webcam
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hermitsings 5y agoNear butter: first good robo invented to pass butter.
- hermitsings 5y agoTypo: Near future