Connectix QuickCam: The First Webcam
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computeradsfromthepast.substack.com
She spent hours on Cu-SeeMe and most of that time was as a porn magnet. She absolutely attracted guys who immediately sent live dick pics. So how does my lovely girlfriend respond but to capture and catalog all of them. She absolutely screenshotted every single one of those pics as they came in; she didn't waste a lot of time engaging anyone, but her collection grew to epic proportions. I'm not entirely sure why she kept it around; it wasn't for blackmail or publication, that's for sure.
Setting up NetMeeting over ISDN using a later model (and, later , an Intel capture board, but I recall the VC QuickCam now, it was the first USB model) was partly what got me into telco:
https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/93863.pdf
The TC255 is a frame-transfer charge-coupled device (CCD) designed for use in B/W NTSC TV and special-purpose applications where low cost and small size are desired. The image-sensing area of the TC255 is configured in 243 lines with 336 elements in each line.
It's a DIL through-hole package with just 8 pins. The output is analog. I wonder how they implemented the A/D conversion and the frame/line buffering.
For Mac users it was one of the most incredible pieces of software ever.
Back in the pre OS X days, you had to pre allocate a block memory that could be used by each app. You set how much memory could be used for an app in its Get Info dialog. Since each block was assigned at launch, you could have plenty of memory available, but as you launched and quit apps, your memory could be “fragmented” so the next app that was launched didn’t have enough contiguous memory.
You would have to quit and relaunch apps so you had enough continuous memory.
The second issue was that you needed to have as much hard drive space available as you wanted to use for swap. For instance, I had 10MB RAM on my old LCII with an 80MB hard drive. If I wanted to have 15 Mb of “virtual memory” that took up 15MB of my hard drive the minute I configured it.
RAM Doubler on the Mac replaced the built in memory management system with a more traditional one. Instead of pre-allocating Photoshop for instance 4MB of RAM you could preallocate more memory and RAM Doubler would make it seem contiguous.
On another note, after the PPC Macs came out, RAM Doubler was bundled with Speed Doubler that replaced the built in 68K emulator with a much faster one.
Ah, the invisible hand of the free market at work.
Connected it to my Mac IIci and experimented with CU-SeeMe. Blew my mind seeing folks in other countries, had only been using the net for ~6 mos. Later took shots every minute or so. Also had a web server running with cgi script that took a text input. You could see if I was at my desk from the page and sent me a spoken message.
Mostly recived animal noises and profanity however. :-D
The real first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
But I think the IndyCam was the first one that was commercially available as a computer accessory, though not exactly affordable back then... still, my students today are amazed to learn that color video conferencing and 3D graphics were possibly almost 30 years ago on a machine that's much slower than an original Raspberry Pi.
I still have mine in the parts bin. Some day I should find a parallel port and try using it again to see how terrible it really was. :)