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Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

I occasionally looked at the webcam, from my home in Germany, via modem.

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.

I remember in the dial-up days finding a website with a live feed of a train set in some faraway part of the way. You could choose a train to make a circuit of the track by clicking a button. The delay was something like 10 seconds but it was absolutely thrilling to cause a remote effect and see it.

We had one at Cygnus - originally it was just a christmas tree and lights, controlled by... finger, I think? and then in later years web (and the train) was added. One year it made the new york times...

I remember a christmas light site, maybe that was it! Though I also remember being skeptical, that it could all be static images that changed on a button push. It didn't ruin the magic though: at the time, even that would have been fairly cool.

Cygnus? The company from Cygwin?

Do you mean UK? As the article (and first webcam) was Cambridge, UK?

There were a handful of coffee cams in the early internet, I remember stumbling across one circa 1996

Good point. I think I mean one that was actually in the US, maybe in Berkeley or the MIT, but I'm not sure.

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.

"It's a kind of magic."

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