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Comment by bjterry | Hacker News Reader

When I imagine a classic webcam, it's definitely the Logitech QuickCam Express (1999), with its memorable industrial design of an orb perched atop a stumpy pyramid. It only predated the iSight (2003) by 4 years, although there were earlier models with a similar design under the Connectix brand name dating back to 1994.

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That's what I thought it would be too --- the "eyeball" which became the standard icon for a webcam.

I remember buying one of those in 2000. It was even USB. A few years later someone gave me another eyeball Logitech without the stand and I just put it on a soda bottle filled with water with a bolt and wing nut through the cap (poor man's tripod). Comparing it to my old one, man was that a huge jump in quality and framerate in just 6 years.

I used it to make this fun little tool:

https://rearviewmirror.cc

Whatever happened to that company that advertised IP cameras literally everywhere in the early days of the internet? I think the main one was called the X1 camera.

For those that weren’t around at the time it’s hard to overstate just how over the top ubiquitous that ad campaign was.

The webcam use case even made its way into browsers, ie multipart/x-mixed-replace was specifically introduced in support of hooking up IP/HTTP-capable cams.

X10.com

Thank you! I was having trouble googling since I couldn’t remember the actual name.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=88041&page=1

https://www.foxnews.com/story/pop-under-ads-click-off-web-su...

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/business/yourmoney/how-go...

To me, the absolute classic webcam is also the original QuickCam[1]. When I was MUCH younger (late 1990s), a group of us at a Global Trading Bank whose name I won't mention bought a bunch of them and set up a web server with all the video feeds in a Zoom-like tiled arrangement. The page was so popular (especially as some of the cameras were owned by some of the ladies in our social group), that one time it took down the internal WAN connection between the London and New York office. Oops.

---

[1] https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Connectix_QuickCam

And the Amazon reviews are still live from the early 2000s!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/reviews/B00001U0AJ/

> If you have a slow computer (less then 200mhz) the pictures will be a bit fuzzy and the lighting is bad.

Agreed, but I was thinking IndyCam

IndyCam had the same resolution as the iSight but it looked like trash. There was a lot of geometric distortion and wacky color fringing.

It was weird because you _could_ get excellent video input on the Indy just by hooking up a real camcorder to the S-Video port. The Indy was the only SGI that came out-of-the-box with analog video capture. But the IndyCam wasn't analog, and it wasn't good for anything either.

It was a tolerant one too. The SGI Pro Video performed better on broadcast grade signals, but would reject many others.

If one wanted to capture vintage / retro computer generated video, the Indy VINO did a great job of it.

Intel had webcams earlier than Logitech, just tried out the Intel PC Pro Camera and the Logitech Quickcam Pro 3000, one of the better orbs from around the turn of the century.

Quickcam now fails to provide a hardware ID but the Intel works.

No Intel drivers this old built into Windows 10 any more or from Windows Update, but there was no need for Windows 9x or the matching VfW or WDM drivers on the original CD.

By the time Windows XP came out there were built-in NT WDM drivers for Intel cams right there in the INF & SYSTEM32 folders.

In Windows 10, pointing Device Manager manually to those XP folders gets the cam working without any need for compatibility mode or anything.

Then the Windows 10 Camera App can not detect the installed WDM cam, but Expression Encoder or VLC have no problem at all.

Incidentally if you are using Windows 10 on a primary partition of a system booting in BIOS (not UEFI) mode, that means you traditionally have a WINDOWS folder on your NTFS _C:_ volume, not much differently than in previous decades. Ideally your NT6 BOOT folder would be on your C: volume too, and that partiton would be Actively bootable instead of some separate hidden boot partition. The NT6 BOOT folder migrated toward hidden during Windows 7 support period. Both NT5 & NT6 work with either combined or separate Boot & System partitions.

So you're basically ready to install XP alongside W10 (without reformatting of course) into its own dedicated folder other than WINDOWS. I suggest the folder WINXP instead of the WINNT name that was also shared by W2K and earlier NT. The XP setup routine will prompt you to create a different folder on your target volume if there is already a WINDOWS folder there. You will have already needed to rename the W10 Program Files folder to something like Program10Files so it will not be replaced by the XP install. The only other folder written by XP setup is Documents And Settings, so there will be a real folder there when finished and W10 can handle it no differently than the default symlink it carries for backward compatibility.

Simply XP setup will overwrite the bootsector of your Active volume with an NT5 NTLDR-seeking version, put NTDETECT.COM, BOOT.INI, and NTLDR on the root of your Active boot volume next to the NT6 BOOTMGR and BOOT folder already there, and write the three WINXP, Program Files, & Documents and Settings folders to C:.

And act like you no longer have Windows 10 unless you know better.

Windows 10 is of course still properly installed too, but it will need a BOOTMGR-seeking bootsector again which can be easily replaced from the command prompt of W10 install media using the BOOTSECT.EXE command. Before you boot back to Windows 10, you need to also rename the new Program Files folder to something like ProgramXPFiles, and rename Program10Files back to plain Program Files.

Then it will act like you don't have XP any more

So then you add an NTLDR entry to the W10 boot menu using BCDEDIT.EXE, not a difficult exercise, and you get freedom of choice.

When XP boots it doesn't use the Program Files folder anyway until you actually try to run a program residing there.

So you can do file management, and lots of other things when booted to XP whenever you want with fewer headaches many times than NT6.

Even without drivers for all your devices, none of them current either, and default low-resolution graphics.

Too bad going forward Intel is discontinuing BIOS support leaving only UEFI on its branded mainboards.

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