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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 intere

by 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.

by mattl 4y ago

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.