Post Al2QOKiaeuVEsjS2S0 by simonbp@social.linux.pizza
(DIR) More posts by simonbp@social.linux.pizza
(DIR) Post #Al1yN2jNFiXo5ZPkUy by vga256@dialup.cafe
2024-08-16T06:00:45Z
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buried in my 30 year old copy of NSCA Mosaic alpha was a bookmarked hyperlink to a university of cambridge (uk) live webcam of a coffee pot, brewing in the Trojan Room computing labwhile live coffee/lab cams were not uncommon in the mid 90s, this one is fascinating for a few reasons:- it was up and running in 1991, predating the graphical world wide web by a few years- it ran over the MSNL protocol using a telecom network standard called ATM, which was a competitor to ethernet- an entire machine was dedicated to grabbing a frame from the camera, compressing it, and uploading to the web server: an Acorn Archimedes 🔥 - the exact URL stored in Mosaic still resolves today, and the web page hasn't changed in 30 yearshttps://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.htmlmore history of the setup here:https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.htmlmore images of the sacred pot by @quentinsf here:https://statusq.org/archives/2024/07/11/12127/#retroComputing #worldWideWeb #webPreservation
(DIR) Post #Al1yN4ijr3DyGB8Gmm by vga256@dialup.cafe
2024-08-16T06:43:17Z
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in case you were curious about what other webpage hyperlinks came pre-bookmarked with NCSA Mosaic 2.0 alpha, distributed at my local university in the WinSLIP package - a popular freeware/shareware internet connection kit used in many north american universities.#webPreservation #worldWideWeb
(DIR) Post #Al207eEiExF7gWrLcW by lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me
2024-08-16T17:22:10.465894Z
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@vga256 @quentinsf One thing I wonder is how it worked on the electronics side of things, it's non-technical biography says there's a framegrabber, so I guess it used a digital camera? (Seems kind of advanced for the time)
(DIR) Post #Al20PozQztfKFVNYm0 by mrcool@social.tchncs.de
2024-08-16T09:43:22Z
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@vga256 Good old times. I do remember how exciting it was to watch the first low-quality #webcams around the world.I should still have a few saved images of early webcams, like one showing a street corner in LA. I certainly don't have saved an image of the coffee pot.
(DIR) Post #Al20PpxLP9aVFJPP9c by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2024-08-16T17:25:30Z
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@mrcool @vga256 In 1994 I put up a fake toilet camera in our house. TIME magazine referenced it as one of the signs of the collapse of culture or something. Was on WPS.COM (down name sold in 2014).https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/ToiletScam/index.htmlThe live camera was really 3 or 4 stills, dark to light, taken with the Connectix and changed via crontab.
(DIR) Post #Al20gIt3blopbgFtiq by quentinsf@mastodon.me.uk
2024-08-16T17:27:55Z
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@lanodan @vga256 I’m pretty sure it was a video camera, in the sense that it produced a rastered output suitable for feeding to a CRT monitor or camcorder or whatever. So a framegrabber card in the computer read that signal through a fast A-to-D converter and captured a frame of video into its RAM, which could then be read out. My memory is that digital *stills* cameras didn’t, in general, come until a few years later.
(DIR) Post #Al2ArhBgbCaXhU2WaO by vga256@dialup.cafe
2024-08-16T19:22:29Z
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@tomjennings 👏 🤣
(DIR) Post #Al2BxRlMxYhLYP2KJM by RL_Dane@fosstodon.org
2024-08-16T19:34:53Z
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@tomjennings @mrcool @vga256 "you have purchaced the world'smost linear Connectix Camera and the world's most linear lightbulb."I remember this!Archive.org still has a still frame of my 2002 webcam. Dear God, those were innocent days.
(DIR) Post #Al2MnnrP2wcGggSlBQ by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2024-08-16T21:36:25Z
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@RL_Dane @mrcool @vga256 Lol I was pretty skeptical borderline cynical by 1995. 10 years of FidoNet -- not that it was any worse than the innernetz say late 2010s -- quite readily showed what people can do. Deluding folx with fake webcams was then "dishonest" for the Internet. Too many people take their shit far too seriously!
(DIR) Post #Al2QOKiaeuVEsjS2S0 by simonbp@social.linux.pizza
2024-08-16T22:16:34Z
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@tomjennings @RL_Dane @mrcool @vga256 TBF, my favorite website circa 1995 was one that just played random fart noises when you clicked a button. The web has all been downhill since then.