Telegarden (1995)

goldberg.berkeley.edu

16 points·broabprobe··6 comments

Ars Electronica, who was a host to the Telegarden for some time, as featured in the article, did a follow-up project called Telezone where people on the Internet could control a robot to build a miniature "city" -> https://ars.electronica.art/futurelab/project/telezone/

Careful not to click any of the "telegarden.org" links at the bottom. Looks like the domain expired and was taken over by a pornography website.

I would be really curious how they stopped ne'er-do-wells from damaging the plants intentionally.

The barrier to entry of the internet in 1995 was considerably higher. It's one of the reasons why early net users were so optimistic about its potential.

Some painful combo of Trumpet Winsock/Win 3.1/Netscape at that time if I wanted more than just lynx, all received via xmodem from the local ISPs shell server using Telix. No Google, maybe help from the local NNTP group.

I do remember this project, and using it for maybe a few weeks. They did track seeds and watering, there were limits to prevent a specific area from being watered too frequently. I don't remember much else.

This is forgetting university students who often had non-dialup access to the Net from computer labs (I even had access to the Net, which was basically just telnet, ftp, and Usenet, in the late 1980s as an undergrad).

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