8 ms·

'A fluke': The oldest webcam is still watching over San Francisco

131 points by Stratoscope 4y ago

mattl 4y ago
It's not the oldest webcam, it's a modern webcam... it's an old webcam site that is still generating images. Interesting, of course, but it would be more interesting if it was still an old Connectix attached to an ancient Macintosh.
- johndoe0815 4y ago
  Definitely not the earliest webcam either - the article itself mentions the Trojan Room coffee pot cam at Cambridge University, UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    OTOH the article does not mention The Amazing Fishcam, which may predate the FogCam. The Amazing Fishcam was available at the URL about:fishcam in Netscape. https://sites.google.com/a/montulli.org/about-fishcam/Home/history https://sites.google.com/a/montulli.org/about-fishcam/Home/h...
  - paxys 4y ago
    Oldest continuously operating webcam.
    - lmm 4y ago
      "The oldest continuously operating webcam is still operating" is tautological, no?
      - fsckboy 4y ago
        the oldest continuously operating webcam might have ceased operating, and the current longest continuously operating webcam may not have been operating anywhere near as long as the previous one had been continuously. something similar happens when the oldest living human dies... if they were exceptionally long lived, there's a good chance the next in line is not, so it can be a big jump down in age
- paxys 4y ago
  It's a Ship of Theseus argument. What is a "webcam"? The camera itself? Its location? The software running on the host computer? The web page it is streaming to? You can replace each of the pieces slowly over time, but in the viewer's eye it is still the same.
  - mattl 4y ago
    Hence webcam vs. webcam site.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Well, it was cam vs webcam. Like we don't call all diaries blogs, just the web logs.
  - askvictor 4y ago
    I kind of hate that the term webcam now generally refers to a USB camera (that is almost exclusively used for zoom). Makes searching for the old-style web cams (i.e. publicly viewable web streaming cameras) much more difficult (and searching for 'live stream' or 'live cam' is fraught in its own way)
    - nocoiner 4y ago
      Oh man, this comment dredged up some deep memories for me. When I first got on the internet in the mid-90s (‘94 maybe?), one of the first web pages I remember finding was the “Peeping Tom Homepage” - a list of webcams available at the time maintained by a computer club at a university in Sweden. I attribute the slightly salacious site title to either irony or a less-than-perfectly-idiomatic command of English, since all the linked sites were completely innocent scenes like this. I spent a lot of time looking at pictures from around the world. Needless to say, I miss that internet a lot.
      - actionfromafar 4y ago
        I was almost there and I think it could have been the very idea of spying on people anywhere was kind of scandalous. It's not what anyone would expect in public. (There was CCTV of course but the expectation was that it would be on a dusty VHS tape on a shelf somewhere.)
- shagie 4y ago
  Ahh... memories of old webcams. In the student lab I hung out in, there was a Mac IIcsomething and somehow it got a video capture card and a video camera. The video capture app was left running on the system (in the startup items too) and would capture once every so often (lets say about a minute). But, by itself, this wasn't enough. So it also ran an ftp server. We then had another system with a cron job and ftp the file to the unix system hosting the web server. Looking it up... https://web.archive.org/web/19990221185541/http://upl.cs.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/uplcam.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990221185541/http://upl.cs.wis...
- pishpash 4y ago
  Yeah that webcam looks too new tech to be from 1994. That kind of device made for clipping to a laptop is mid-2000's tech. Early webcams were round or square and came on their own stand. More importantly, USB 1.0 was only standardized in 1996... so originally it must have been a serial or parallel port peripheral that may or may not have needed a separate digitizer, and it was almost certainly black-and-white. Maybe it was the Connectix QuickCam. The reporter seems entirely too young to know how to capture how archaic the thing really was.
  - conradfr 4y ago
    It's clearly stated in the article that this is not the original webcam.
worldmerge 4y ago
What process should I follow if I want to stream a normal webcam to the web using my own webserver? I would like to just query the webcam and post it on the site without outside streaming like youtube or twitch.
- woleium 4y ago
  no need for a webserver. just buy a network enabled camera. they are like $20
- thakoppno 4y ago
  one solution that might work for you and may approach some definition of simplicity would be ffmpeg + caddy + videojs. basically use ffmpeg to make an m3u8. use caddy to serve the video files and the html/js. videojs will rebox the m3u8 for your friends using chrome/android.
- paxys 4y ago
  There are tons of libraries and commands (e.g. ffmpeg) that will save a still frame from a camera input. Build a web page around that using whatever stack you like.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  On a network camera like an Axis you can just curl down a frame.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  If you want a very low FPS stream you can do what @paxys mentioned and just take stills from the camera and serve them in an HTML page and refresh as often as you like. Let the user refresh the page, or use javascript to do it automatically. If you want more of a "proper" video stream (whatever that means) one good choice is to use Icecast[1][2]. It makes it pretty easy to set up audio and video streams and publish them. [1]: https://icecast.org/ https://icecast.org/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icecast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icecast
  - tshaddox 4y ago
geekrax 4y ago
Link to the FogCam website: https://fogcam.org/ https://fogcam.org/ Maybe it's just me but I couldn't find the direct link in the article except in one caption field and a few invisible credit fields.
wikibob 4y ago
Spoiler, It’s a new webcam.
- bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
  I was hoping to see what a .1 megapixel digital camera looks like.
  - wanderingjew 4y ago
    https://640by480.com/ https://640by480.com/
  - pishpash 4y ago
    But worse, because cameras back then had horrible shot noise and used horrible JPEG compression.
BaudouinVH 4y ago
this webcam went through a near-death-experience in 2019 : The Longest Running Web Cam, Set to Go Offline, Has Been Saved https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/longest-running-web-cam-goes-offline-month-180972946/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/longest-running-we...
globular-toast 4y ago
I don't understand how this is a fluke. Is this some weird American way to use the word?
- cdot2 4y ago
  A fluke would be an unusual example of something. It's pretty unusual for a webcam to be online for 28 years.
  - globular-toast 4y ago
    No, a fluke is a lucky event that you are unable to reproduce. This could totally be reproduced and, in fact, was done deliberately. A fluke would be me, an unskilled player, throwing a basketball and getting a lucky hoop. But getting a basketball through the hoop is not an unusual example of anything.
    - moomin 4y ago
      OK, you've just reminded me of one of my favourite stories. In Alien Resurrection, there's a scene where "Ripley" throws a basket ball behind her and it goes straight in the hoop. Now, obviously, you only need one take, but still Sigourney Weaver needed to practice. And practice she did, getting it so that she could reliably do it from a fixed spot in ten or so tries. Then she gets there and the set and marks are _much_ bigger than she was expecting. Like, four times as far. They discuss this, realize there's absolutely no chance of this working, so just agree that she'll throw it, and they'll cut to the ball going in. So she goes and takes the shot and... the ball goes in the basket. There's video of this online that includes the cheers from everyone in the crew who saw it happen. Just don't ask her to do it again.
ctrlmeta 4y ago
> Historically, the first webcam actually predated the web. Contradiction? Maybe they meant that the first internet cam predated the web? Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot has more details. So the Trojan Room coffee pot cam began its life as a local network cam which then went on to become the first web cam. So no contradiction there! Interesting bit of history!
- moomin 4y ago
  We used to have a program `xcoffee`. You ran it and it displayed the latest image in a window.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
_qua 4y ago
This site (sfgate) is very difficult to use on mobile. Ads cover most of the screen and it messes up the back button history.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
Someone should really put a webcam on the oldest continuously running lightbulb. The one that's been in that one firehouse since the early 1900s.
- t_von_doom 4y ago
  I don’t know if you are being tongue in cheek here, but in case you aren’t: It’s been done! https://www.centennialbulb.org https://www.centennialbulb.org
redmen 4y ago

131 points by Stratoscope 4y ago

It's not the oldest webcam, it's a modern webcam... it's an old webcam site that is still generating images. Interesting, of course, but it would be more interesting if it was still an old Connectix attached to an ancient Macintosh.

johndoe0815 4y ago
Definitely not the earliest webcam either - the article itself mentions the Trojan Room coffee pot cam at Cambridge University, UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jeffbee 4y ago
  OTOH the article does not mention The Amazing Fishcam, which may predate the FogCam. The Amazing Fishcam was available at the URL about:fishcam in Netscape. https://sites.google.com/a/montulli.org/about-fishcam/Home/history https://sites.google.com/a/montulli.org/about-fishcam/Home/h...
- paxys 4y ago
  Oldest continuously operating webcam.
  - lmm 4y ago
    "The oldest continuously operating webcam is still operating" is tautological, no?
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      the oldest continuously operating webcam might have ceased operating, and the current longest continuously operating webcam may not have been operating anywhere near as long as the previous one had been continuously. something similar happens when the oldest living human dies... if they were exceptionally long lived, there's a good chance the next in line is not, so it can be a big jump down in age
paxys 4y ago
It's a Ship of Theseus argument. What is a "webcam"? The camera itself? Its location? The software running on the host computer? The web page it is streaming to? You can replace each of the pieces slowly over time, but in the viewer's eye it is still the same.
- mattl 4y ago
  Hence webcam vs. webcam site.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Well, it was cam vs webcam. Like we don't call all diaries blogs, just the web logs.
- askvictor 4y ago
  I kind of hate that the term webcam now generally refers to a USB camera (that is almost exclusively used for zoom). Makes searching for the old-style web cams (i.e. publicly viewable web streaming cameras) much more difficult (and searching for 'live stream' or 'live cam' is fraught in its own way)
  - nocoiner 4y ago
    Oh man, this comment dredged up some deep memories for me. When I first got on the internet in the mid-90s (‘94 maybe?), one of the first web pages I remember finding was the “Peeping Tom Homepage” - a list of webcams available at the time maintained by a computer club at a university in Sweden. I attribute the slightly salacious site title to either irony or a less-than-perfectly-idiomatic command of English, since all the linked sites were completely innocent scenes like this. I spent a lot of time looking at pictures from around the world. Needless to say, I miss that internet a lot.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      I was almost there and I think it could have been the very idea of spying on people anywhere was kind of scandalous. It's not what anyone would expect in public. (There was CCTV of course but the expectation was that it would be on a dusty VHS tape on a shelf somewhere.)
shagie 4y ago
Ahh... memories of old webcams. In the student lab I hung out in, there was a Mac IIcsomething and somehow it got a video capture card and a video camera. The video capture app was left running on the system (in the startup items too) and would capture once every so often (lets say about a minute). But, by itself, this wasn't enough. So it also ran an ftp server. We then had another system with a cron job and ftp the file to the unix system hosting the web server. Looking it up... https://web.archive.org/web/19990221185541/http://upl.cs.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/uplcam.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990221185541/http://upl.cs.wis...
pishpash 4y ago
Yeah that webcam looks too new tech to be from 1994. That kind of device made for clipping to a laptop is mid-2000's tech. Early webcams were round or square and came on their own stand. More importantly, USB 1.0 was only standardized in 1996... so originally it must have been a serial or parallel port peripheral that may or may not have needed a separate digitizer, and it was almost certainly black-and-white. Maybe it was the Connectix QuickCam. The reporter seems entirely too young to know how to capture how archaic the thing really was.
- conradfr 4y ago
  It's clearly stated in the article that this is not the original webcam.

worldmerge 4y ago

What process should I follow if I want to stream a normal webcam to the web using my own webserver? I would like to just query the webcam and post it on the site without outside streaming like youtube or twitch.

woleium 4y ago
no need for a webserver. just buy a network enabled camera. they are like $20
thakoppno 4y ago
one solution that might work for you and may approach some definition of simplicity would be ffmpeg + caddy + videojs. basically use ffmpeg to make an m3u8. use caddy to serve the video files and the html/js. videojs will rebox the m3u8 for your friends using chrome/android.
paxys 4y ago
There are tons of libraries and commands (e.g. ffmpeg) that will save a still frame from a camera input. Build a web page around that using whatever stack you like.
jeffbee 4y ago
On a network camera like an Axis you can just curl down a frame.
mindcrime 4y ago
If you want a very low FPS stream you can do what @paxys mentioned and just take stills from the camera and serve them in an HTML page and refresh as often as you like. Let the user refresh the page, or use javascript to do it automatically. If you want more of a "proper" video stream (whatever that means) one good choice is to use Icecast[1][2]. It makes it pretty easy to set up audio and video streams and publish them. [1]: https://icecast.org/ https://icecast.org/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icecast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icecast
- tshaddox 4y ago

geekrax 4y ago

Link to the FogCam website: https://fogcam.org/ https://fogcam.org/ Maybe it's just me but I couldn't find the direct link in the article except in one caption field and a few invisible credit fields.

wikibob 4y ago

Spoiler, It’s a new webcam.

bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
I was hoping to see what a .1 megapixel digital camera looks like.
- wanderingjew 4y ago
  https://640by480.com/ https://640by480.com/
- pishpash 4y ago
  But worse, because cameras back then had horrible shot noise and used horrible JPEG compression.

BaudouinVH 4y ago

this webcam went through a near-death-experience in 2019 : The Longest Running Web Cam, Set to Go Offline, Has Been Saved https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/longest-running-web-cam-goes-offline-month-180972946/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/longest-running-we...

globular-toast 4y ago

I don't understand how this is a fluke. Is this some weird American way to use the word?

cdot2 4y ago
A fluke would be an unusual example of something. It's pretty unusual for a webcam to be online for 28 years.
- globular-toast 4y ago
  No, a fluke is a lucky event that you are unable to reproduce. This could totally be reproduced and, in fact, was done deliberately. A fluke would be me, an unskilled player, throwing a basketball and getting a lucky hoop. But getting a basketball through the hoop is not an unusual example of anything.
  - moomin 4y ago
    OK, you've just reminded me of one of my favourite stories. In Alien Resurrection, there's a scene where "Ripley" throws a basket ball behind her and it goes straight in the hoop. Now, obviously, you only need one take, but still Sigourney Weaver needed to practice. And practice she did, getting it so that she could reliably do it from a fixed spot in ten or so tries. Then she gets there and the set and marks are _much_ bigger than she was expecting. Like, four times as far. They discuss this, realize there's absolutely no chance of this working, so just agree that she'll throw it, and they'll cut to the ball going in. So she goes and takes the shot and... the ball goes in the basket. There's video of this online that includes the cheers from everyone in the crew who saw it happen. Just don't ask her to do it again.

ctrlmeta 4y ago

> Historically, the first webcam actually predated the web. Contradiction? Maybe they meant that the first internet cam predated the web? Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot has more details. So the Trojan Room coffee pot cam began its life as a local network cam which then went on to become the first web cam. So no contradiction there! Interesting bit of history!

moomin 4y ago
We used to have a program `xcoffee`. You ran it and it displayed the latest image in a window.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

_qua 4y ago

This site (sfgate) is very difficult to use on mobile. Ads cover most of the screen and it messes up the back button history.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

Someone should really put a webcam on the oldest continuously running lightbulb. The one that's been in that one firehouse since the early 1900s.

t_von_doom 4y ago
I don’t know if you are being tongue in cheek here, but in case you aren’t: It’s been done! https://www.centennialbulb.org https://www.centennialbulb.org

redmen 4y ago