The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a coffee pot
openculture.com
openculture.com
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-exper...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...
They didn’t chose it for any technical reasons, it was just what they happened to have.
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.
The one I've looked at did not require xcoffee, but was on an actual HTML page, so was a few years later (1994 or 1995 is my guess, I don't think I had Internet access before that).
So I probably did not look at that coffee webcam, but it was still "magic" at that time.
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.
lena512color.tiff actually, the png format didn't exist until 1996.
"the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of," 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
That made me laugh :-)
and more icebergs are forming//smashing together every month!
I remember seeing my first digital photograph (a blurry, dark scan of a wine bottle label) on the web and being mesmerized. Because before that, web images were exclusively computer art.
I roam around Cybersphere at least daily or every two days.
The possibilities in a MUD are much wider than, for example, Cyberpunk 2077.
Development now is so smooth.
Then? Fire up your chainsaw.
"Di ba didi dou Didi didldildidldidl houdihoudi dey douDibidi ba didi dou dou" on high volume goes a long way in the middle of the night.
Apropos of nothing, but one of the stories I love to tell during interviews was the discovery that a 2,400bps modem was faster than the 56kbps one.
I was designing a "box" to read a group of switches and transfer that switch state information via modem to another "box" at the end of the phone line that replicated the switch on/off positions. During initial testing, I found out that with a 2400bps modem, my system could read the switches, dial the downstream modem and transfer the data and hang up before the 56k modems had even finished negotiating their speeds.
Latency often trumps bandwidth!
I changed it to 'if you have a packet, send it. If you can't buffer a packet, NACK it'. Now we could run full speed (and full duplex!) It instantly became practical to log in remotely and use source control on our server. Which mattered to me, because I was remote-working.
Anyway, nostalgia
Knowledge of AT commands is still useful today, but the modems are cellular: https://www.twilio.com/docs/iot/supersim/introduction-at-com...
Since at 28.8k and higher the modems are negotiating more than just frequencies (phase shifts and bit compression are also negotiated, IIRC), telling a 56k to run at 2.4k should have the same effect.
Nothing beats a good degaussing, ah...
Really? Wow. I can't even ping internal AWS services (like the EC2 Metadata Service, NTP, or DNS). Nothing responds to ICMP Echo anymore, and it makes me sad. Lately it feels like `ping' has become useless
Why are we doing this to ourselves?
Ping flood attacks. A lot of the early protocols have had to be discarded because they had all the privacy and security of a postcard.
One time we stuck aluminum foil to the CRT screen and ran a wire off of it and zapped various objects and each other with the arcs.
And of course the BWONGGG of degausing.
Cathode ray tubes, what a hoot.
it almost makes me feel nostalgic even though I never worked there ahah
thank you for sharing.
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.
And sharing video was a PITA until YouTube, essentially.
This is the most “future is already here – just not very evenly distributed” quote I’ve ever seen. :)
In 1994?! Name two, please.
The first widely known laptop with integrated webcam option, at a pricepoint starting at US$12,000, was an IBM RS/6000 860 laptop and his ThinkPad 850 sibling, released in 1996.[1]
As I recall, even though there was at least one commercial webcam available in 1994, it was very uncommon for anyone to have an external webcam connected to their computer even up to 1998-2000, let alone a built-in camera. Certainly there were "pioneers," those with interest that always had the new doodads, but I would not remotely describe them as "not uncommon." They were precisely uncommon, i.e. maybe 5% or less of home computer users had a webcam prior to 1998.
You know, not being impressed isn't a virtue or anything, and it isn't a crime nor even a character flaw to be impressed, even if mildly, on occasion.
Also, let's not conflate the Internet with the WWW. First streaming webcam is a decent woop, especially considering that beyond processor, resolution, bandwidth increases and new protocols, not much has changed, the evolution has stalled. Though every device today has a built-in camera, one might expect there to be a layer of the Internet dedicated to video, but there is not. The best we have even today are video posting sites, and sites of live webcam directories, when there should be something better by now, some sort of seamless integration of all the live cameras, perhaps like in that Batman movie.
[1] some wiki
The coffee cam was such a thing. It wasn't a "webcam" as in a thing made by logitec sitting on top of the LCD monitor, connected via USB. None of those things existed in 1993. But cameras on computers did, and had done for years and years. Heck even video phones existed.
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.
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!
edit: but I wouldn't say that it was the motivation
Compare that to 2011 onward.
It’s like night and day.
It's still alive and has a list of mostly broken links
I think it was between Stanford and MIT in 1971 or 1972, something like that. I probably read it in Hackers.
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.
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.
they experimented with satellite links before settling in on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe
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.
Imagine what some people would go through to get coffee if it became illegal now.