One of the earliest webcams is still around at MIT Media Lab! When I was there, I would use it to give away free food. It's installed in a corner of the lab facing down so you can place free objects under it. I would place free food under the webcam and press the broadcast button. It would send an image to various IRC channels and other subscribers. Within minutes, hungry lab folks would rush in to grab the food. Probably my favorite memory of being at the lab.

When I was there, there was a slack channel rebroadcasting the webcam feed providing desktop & mobile notifications. Based on the quality of the food in the feed, you could conjecture that funders were visiting for a meal, or when director-level staff meetings were occuring.

Webcam feed.

I remember reading about this maybe a few years ago, and it’s such a brilliant use.

World's longest lab experiment still going strong, via webcam

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...

As the website has no link to the stream, here's the website to follow the next drop: http://thetenthwatch.com/

Breakrooms also have a dark side:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...

Imagine thinking you've discovered some mysterious signal that could herald the next Cosmic Microwave Background, only to discover impatient astronomers.

Who knew my mother was right all along to scold me for opening the microwave before the timer went off

It’s interesting that it was hosted on an Acorn Archimedes workstation, the first consumer product with an ARM chip inside it. (ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine.)

They didn’t chose it for any technical reasons, it was just what they happened to have.

I used them for technical reasons. It was amazing what crap you could hang off a user port podule. At one point I had a home security system running off a limping A420. This was until the power supply exploded and nearly burned my house down when I was out. It was never replaced.

I have some memories from early 90s Archimedes running a cam at a computer show. Pretty amazing I think it was showing about a frame every 1 to 2 seconds

Lou Montulli's Fishcam, which was the second live webcam and a hidden easter egg in Netscape, is still up and running!

https://www.fishcam.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishcam#Netscape

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli#Ongoing_projects

FishCam was a requirement we put in when we moved to Zetta's offices near the Sunnyvale dump.

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?

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.

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

"It's a kind of magic."

This is just three years before Jennifer Ringley created the concept of a "camgirl" with JenniCam. The information superhighway, as it were, really was the wild, wild West in those days.

I believe the first image broadcast over the ARPANET was in the 70s and was supposedly from a porn movie shot at the DC Powers building (home of the Stanford AI Lab).

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.

Reminds me of lena.png

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

> lena.png

lena512color.tiff actually, the png format didn't exist until 1996.

Josh Harris was also active in Video broadcast scene at that time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Harris_(Internet)

"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

In case anyone is curious, the domain now hosts camgirl porn.

Isn't the original website cl.cam.ac.uk?

> The image was only updated about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee.”

That made me laugh :-)

I miss old internet so much.

The sound of a modem handshake. The whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up. A vending machine on another uni's campus replying to your pings. Hum of a computer lab with the hollow of elevated floor under your feet. Those linen floppy sleeves. Using finger. Plan files. To each their own, obviously, but welcome to nostalgia.

> The sound of a modem handshake

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!

Ha! I rewrote the CTOS serial protocol for the OS message passing link. It had been severely limited by fixed timers between polls, so going faster than 9600 didn't matter.

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

Something I had completely forgotten. I was writing a modem pool software server for a custom payment gateway back around 2004. Point of sale terminals would normally be configured for around 9600 baud for this reason. Payloads were typically small and link establishment was the priority.

Very neat. I recall in the dusty recesses of my mind various settings that you could pass to a modem at call initialisation to force certain speeds, modes, and other parameters. Did it have to be an actual 2400 baud modem or could you just "step down" the 56k for the same effect?

Usually yes, with an AT command: http://www.messagestick.net/modem/Hayes_Ch1-1.html

Knowledge of AT commands is still useful today, but the modems are cellular: https://www.twilio.com/docs/iot/supersim/introduction-at-com...

Just finished a project last summer with a cell modem, actually. Felt weird using AT commands to make an http connection.

It was a one-off I built for a water utility in Connecticut. I'm pretty sure it was an embedded XECOM 2,400bps modem, but I don't remember how I figured out it was faster to do that than to use a 56.6k modem which I would have expected to be faster.

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.

(Leaving aside the obvious Usenet) Gopher. GIFs. Webpages hewn out of raw HTML by amateurs. The time before 56.6 modems were ubiquitous. Walking away while a webpage loaded. Everything text based (MUDs, IRC). University computers offering you power you could never afford at home. Leaving downloads running overnight. The wild diversity of non-Ethernet networks. Physical computer retail stores. ICQ. Self-hosted persistent gaming servers. Napster being new.

I guess we're just going to gloss over how much of a terrible thing Novell Netware and Lotus Notes were to sysadmin :D

Oh, so many things were terrible, but it was definitely different. And quaint.

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.

What you call terrible I called job security.

Gopher, MUDs and IRC are still alive.

I roam around Cybersphere at least daily or every two days.

The possibilities in a MUD are much wider than, for example, Cyberpunk 2077.

One thing that is better is that the university computers are xeon hpc clusters now and you can ssh to it from anywhere with anything.

Eventually, a grumpy old man* will show up and mention teletype and time-sharing. Someone else will incorrect him saying cloud computing is different. I'd love to hear Peter Norvig and Bill Gates talk it over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Ztdp70peU&t=115s

It's still nothing like today. I could connect to the cluster with my phone in a gas station bathroom if I wanted to. Imagine telling people from the 1970s the sheer amount of computational power I can trivially call up today over the course of a bowel movement on the side of the road.

Hewn? As in shaped out of a piece of wood. Great word to use in this context, bravo.

It seemed apropos to the experience of writing HTML.

Development now is so smooth.

Then? Fire up your chainsaw.

>A vending machine on another uni's campus replying to your pings

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?

> 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.

Reading this just gave me the sensation of turning on the Apple Macintosh (or something similar) in the school computer lab and feeling the hair on my forearm stand on end from the static.

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.

Finger, .plan and .project, talk, email, netnews... Unix was social media.

Tildes exist today with that premise. Bullshit free social collaboration and thinkering.

Life was simpler when you could stick hand coded HTML and some gifs in your ~/public_html folder and bingo, you had a web page.

Today I do that with ~/public_gopher in a Spanish language based punbix. Much easier to setup.

> The whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up.

Nothing beats a good degaussing, ah...

I still use a CRT alongside a newer monitor. The CRT is 1600x1200@75Hz and still looks great. It definitely took time for flatscreen to catch up.

I am not nostalgic for CRTs. Not even remotely. I sat behind one for 20 years.

I have a laptop from the 90's that will still boot. I booted it up, poked around a bit, said "nahhh" and that was it.

Cats miss CRT's a lot more than we do

The whirl of a network cable bustling with traffic. https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technolo...

No love for the internet Oracle? What else was one supposed to do late at night when they had a deeply meaningful question that just had to get answered?

There was always the option to send links to the Hampsterdance site to people that just started using Winamp to play music on their stereo.

"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.

I think that's why we're on here so much.

Aging polar bears on the last piece of melting sea ice

It's getting awfully chilly in these waters,

and more icebergs are forming//smashing together every month!

For some reason, I never realized that until this moment.

BoingBoing (the source of this story) is one of those places that has withstood the test of time.

Just like with horses and cars, the old thing was not destroyed when the new thing came along side it. You can still ride a horse. You can still browse the old internet.

An Australian ISP have had a webcam pointed at their coffee pot for a while too [1] It has persevered through a few coffee machines, cameras, corporate takeover and assimilation, so far.

1: http://looking-glass.iinet.net.au/coffee/history/

Wow that page with the history of all the changes over the years is such a good read :-)

it almost makes me feel nostalgic even though I never worked there ahah

thank you for sharing.

I mostly remember this because of the brief appearance in "Halt and Catch Fire", which captured the fascination of early webcams in a few seconds.

Oh, it was an Olivetti camera <3

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriano_Olivetti

I recall those days and hard to fathom today why this was such a big deal. Was really hard to do anything like this back in those days.

I remember looking at the coffee cam and not thinking "wow, a live camera on the web" but rather "they pointed the camera at their coffee pot, that's weird". So the notion that someone would put a video camera feed on the internet was at the time completely uninteresting. Video over networks was a thing that had existed for years prior. That someone had written a script to frame-grab into a file that was underneath a server, accessible over the network, was not new or novel. I bet it had been done many times before. I think this is a good example of how history can be somewhat bogus. It makes a great story to say that the coffee pot cam was the world's first webcam, because a) the people involved wrote about it and b) a webcam is a thing we recognize today. But back then nobody would have thought of a thing called a webcam because while cameras on computers were not uncommon, they were quite expensive, and nobody (to a first approximation) had a connection fast enough to practically use them. Nobody really considered "the web" in the humanity-changing way that we see it today. People used Compuserve and AOL and the internet/web was possibly going to take off with regular folks, but who knew exactly how things were going to play out.

> cameras on computers were not uncommon

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

I said cameras on computers, as in connected with a wire. I worked on such systems all the way back to the 1980s. There was a type of card (that I designed once) called a frame grabber. You connected a stock 1v video signal to said card.

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.

> So the notion that someone would put a video camera feed on the internet was at the time completely uninteresting.

This is the most “future is already here – just not very evenly distributed” quote I’ve ever seen. :)

What has not been done before may not be inherently difficult, but the creativity part is since it hasn't been done before.

I remember trying to use CU-SeeMe at some point in maybe 1995 but not ever doing so successfully.

And sharing video was a PITA until YouTube, essentially.

Ahhh the Trojan Room: I remember when it was next to a genuine halide protected machine room, back when SunOS computers were more valuable than human life and info was a viable alternative to man.

Since we're doing nostalgia: I could see the webcam and could even see through the window (or was it a glass wall?) into the Trojan Room but didn't have a key to get in :-(

I remember a sysadmin at my university showing the web version of this to me in spring 1994. This is back when there was no Internet in dorm rooms at most schools. You had to go to a computer lab to use native IP applications or dialin to a 2400 baud modem pool for telnet/shell server access (9600 baud if you were lucky).

What's their pricing model? As a SaaS, a freemium tier might be a useful enticement, but should probably be limited to 1 refresh/hour. Since it's mostly a single-use app the price after should be cheap: $1.99/month/seat for 15-minute refreshes, up to $6.99 for once a minute. I'm not sure how many tiers in between would be needed.

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.

This guy fucks.

Ah fond memories of my roommate and I (circa 1997) hacking together a webcam of an RC car in our backyard. It involved me writing some sort of perl script to pipe the low-res jpegs dumped from god knows what camera to I honestly can't remember what sort of web resource (maybe I transcoded the jpegs into an endless streaming GIF?) and my roommate doing the dirty work of bit-banging some kind of rs-232 connected servos to wire the remote up to the server (which I then hooked up via some perl scripts to our webpage).

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!

There was also one to keep an eye on the candy machine stock. Though talking about these early webcams makes me feel every pain and creak in my old joints.

So, back in the day when I posted the very first 'livestream' straight to the browser I got a lot of flak from people who thought it was fake :)

I wonder if this is related to the 418 "I'm a teapot" HTTP response code?

418s were issued if someone used the wrong pot. 410s were issued when someone did not return the coffee pot after a set time. 404s were issued after that. 403s were issued when someone from marketing tried to get coffee.

The Trojan Room Coffee pot is mentioned in the RFC as an example. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324

edit: but I wouldn't say that it was the motivation

The first internet connected toaster from 1990

https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_toast.htm

I remember this vividly, watched it on my NeXT. I found it highly amusing to later find Quentin doing VNC (and later DisplayLink), and follow his blog to this day.

One of the most impressive webcam transformations, IMHO, is from the BurningMan project. I recall the burn was first broadcast about 1999, when I was on playa, and I remember trying to watch in 2001 when I was not able to attend. The image was tiny, low bit rate, and buggy.

Compare that to 2011 onward.

It’s like night and day.

https://burningman.org/?s=Webcam

Lol “keep an eye on” makes it sound like that coffee pot might step out of line and do something unexpected.

Another fun one: Here's a 'web cam' (refreshing image every 30s) to keep an eye on a light bulb which has been lit for over a century:

https://www.centennialbulb.org/cam.htm

Anyone remember the random camera page on xmission.com? https://user.xmission.com/~bill/randcamera.html

It's still alive and has a list of mostly broken links

Much props to this guy, The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

There was an old rumor that the first internet e-commerce transaction was a bag of weed. I don’t remember the specifics though.

I think it was between Stanford and MIT in 1971 or 1972, something like that. I probably read it in Hackers.

Does anyone else remember when you could "finger" the Coke machine?

That's fantastic, I miss those ideas and tools. Modern computers are boring, sterile and devoid of humour.

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.

You could probably make a modern cross-platform finger client using Electron!

To those seemingly confused by this: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

Here’s the man page for finger:

https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger

I used to run a website for a university research ship, and you could "finger" the ship when in port and get current meteorological and sea data (temp, salinity, etc.)

finger -l [email protected] was the call. "oldman" was the Sun workstation running the ships data systems, and "lubber" was the one on my desk.

As founder and CEO of a YC company that is focused on coffee monitoring devices, I'll choose to believe that this is a good omen. Clearly coffee is a ripe place to start when building new tech!

interesting, can't remember the exact dates, but in 91(possibly 92) when I was on IRC I used to talk with someone at washington state University who was doing a project on streaming video on the internet using SGI computers I think it was, technically not on the web though, and I can't remember much of the details.

Might of been Global Schoolhouse project https://web.archive.org/web/20091213001309/http://www.virtua...

they experimented with satellite links before settling in on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe

It appears that almost all cool tech is invented for the purpose of minor comfort.

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.

Nescafe is the mother of invention.

Sure, if the invention is killing babies.

Near butter: first good robo invented to pass butter.

Typo: Near future

How many times do I have to hear this? lol

Coffee makes the world go round

In some parts of the world, coffee has been an illegal drug.

Imagine what some people would go through to get coffee if it became illegal now.

The second one was the Netscape fish tank that you could watch by typing ctrl-alt-f.