Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattl | Hacker News Reader

It's not the oldest webcam, it's a modern webcam... it's an old webcam site that is still generating images. Interesting, of course, but it would be more interesting if it was still an old Connectix attached to an ancient Macintosh.

View on HN

It's a Ship of Theseus argument. What is a "webcam"? The camera itself? Its location? The software running on the host computer? The web page it is streaming to?

You can replace each of the pieces slowly over time, but in the viewer's eye it is still the same.

Hence webcam vs. webcam site.

Well, it was cam vs webcam. Like we don't call all diaries blogs, just the web logs.

I kind of hate that the term webcam now generally refers to a USB camera (that is almost exclusively used for zoom). Makes searching for the old-style web cams (i.e. publicly viewable web streaming cameras) much more difficult (and searching for 'live stream' or 'live cam' is fraught in its own way)

Oh man, this comment dredged up some deep memories for me. When I first got on the internet in the mid-90s (‘94 maybe?), one of the first web pages I remember finding was the “Peeping Tom Homepage” - a list of webcams available at the time maintained by a computer club at a university in Sweden.

I attribute the slightly salacious site title to either irony or a less-than-perfectly-idiomatic command of English, since all the linked sites were completely innocent scenes like this.

I spent a lot of time looking at pictures from around the world. Needless to say, I miss that internet a lot.

I was almost there and I think it could have been the very idea of spying on people anywhere was kind of scandalous. It's not what anyone would expect in public. (There was CCTV of course but the expectation was that it would be on a dusty VHS tape on a shelf somewhere.)

Nice point. I like how the author tries to hand wave away:

> held up by a couple of pieces of blue gaffer tape.

Gaffer tape is fairly expensive, more expensive than Gorilla tape of the same width and length. At times, gaffer tape is worth its volume in dimes. That isn't a cheap fix nor is it a good fix. Gaffer tape has a purpose and that isn't it (unless for some reason it needed to be disassembled often). Duct tape would have been a better fix and probably cost a sixth as much, but would have been permanent unless leaving adhesive all over it doesn't count as totaled.

I think the author mistook gaffer tape for painter's tape.

Maybe, but I think the implied reason for the detail was to suggest it was a precarious and cheap fix. But inch for inch, it really wasn't all that cheap.

edit: I think you're absolutely right.

painter's "masking tape"

fun fact: at the current time afaik you can get the whole rainbow of colors of masking tape in NYC, but LA seems to only have blue and neutral/tan

I imagine someone who knows what gaff tape is wouldn't mistake it for masking tape.

If this comment isn't satire, I weep for the world. Any kind of adhesive tape is statistically going to be much cheaper than a damn tripod, let alone whatever alternative structure might be under consideration to affix the device to the window. Gaffer tape does indeed have a purpose: whatever the hell the user is trying to accomplish. It's not an orbital launch platform.

just for the record, in the photo the camera is supported by a tripod. perhaps the tape keeps it steadier.

They did say the only times it needs physically checked up on is when the tripod gets knocked over. Maybe they need to use name-brand gaffa tape instead of deliberalely-not-that-sticky blue masking tape.

From their site:

> We've slightly changed campus locations a few times as necessary over the years, to prevent being shut down by the university.

Gaffer tape doesn't leave residue (or very little that's easy to remove), so I can imagine "not damaging the building" (making marks on the glass) being a condition of it staying up.

Different brands vary, but IME this is only correct for a few weeks at best. Otherwise you'll get a lot of residue, and if it's been outside exposed to UV you'll get even more. And duck tape is worse.

The thing is, the glue on masking tape becomes impossible to remove if it gets damp, at all, which is why it's dangerous leaving stuff masked up overnight.

Rather like Trigger's Broom[1]

[1] https://www.adambowie.com/blog/2018/06/triggers-broom/

Ahh... memories of old webcams.

In the student lab I hung out in, there was a Mac IIcsomething and somehow it got a video capture card and a video camera. The video capture app was left running on the system (in the startup items too) and would capture once every so often (lets say about a minute). But, by itself, this wasn't enough. So it also ran an ftp server. We then had another system with a cron job and ftp the file to the unix system hosting the web server.

Looking it up...

https://web.archive.org/web/19990221185541/http://upl.cs.wis...

Definitely not the earliest webcam either - the article itself mentions the Trojan Room coffee pot cam at Cambridge University, UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

OTOH the article does not mention The Amazing Fishcam, which may predate the FogCam. The Amazing Fishcam was available at the URL about:fishcam in Netscape.

https://sites.google.com/a/montulli.org/about-fishcam/Home/h...

Oldest continuously operating webcam.

"The oldest continuously operating webcam is still operating" is tautological, no?

the oldest continuously operating webcam might have ceased operating, and the current longest continuously operating webcam may not have been operating anywhere near as long as the previous one had been continuously.

something similar happens when the oldest living human dies... if they were exceptionally long lived, there's a good chance the next in line is not, so it can be a big jump down in age

Yeah that webcam looks too new tech to be from 1994. That kind of device made for clipping to a laptop is mid-2000's tech. Early webcams were round or square and came on their own stand. More importantly, USB 1.0 was only standardized in 1996... so originally it must have been a serial or parallel port peripheral that may or may not have needed a separate digitizer, and it was almost certainly black-and-white. Maybe it was the Connectix QuickCam.

The reporter seems entirely too young to know how to capture how archaic the thing really was.

It's clearly stated in the article that this is not the original webcam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com