[HN Gopher] The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a co...
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The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a coffee pot
Author : elorant
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-09-15 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| Imnimo wrote:
| Nescafe is the mother of invention.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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 :)
| ubicomp wrote:
| 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.
| will_walker wrote:
| 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.
| 0x456 wrote:
| Breakrooms also have a dark side:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Imagine thinking you've discovered some mysterious signal that
| could herald the next Cosmic Microwave Background, only to
| discover impatient astronomers.
| asdff wrote:
| Who knew my mother was right all along to scold me for
| opening the microwave before the timer went off
| kloch wrote:
| 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).
| fossuser wrote:
| 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.
| pico303 wrote:
| 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.
| altacc wrote:
| I wonder if this is related to the 418 "I'm a teapot" HTTP
| response code?
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| Shatnerz wrote:
| 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
| ajsharp wrote:
| Lol "keep an eye on" makes it sound like that coffee pot might
| step out of line and do something unexpected.
| kloch wrote:
| 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
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| The first internet connected toaster from 1990
|
| https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_toast.htm
| jalk wrote:
| > 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 :-)
| [deleted]
| anyfoo wrote:
| 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.
| barbs wrote:
| 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.
| angrais wrote:
| Do you mean UK? As the article (and first webcam) was
| Cambridge, UK?
| hadlock wrote:
| There were a handful of coffee cams in the early internet, I
| remember stumbling across one circa 1996
| anyfoo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| "It's a kind of magic."
| beamatronic wrote:
| Does anyone else remember when you could "finger" the Coke
| machine?
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| dividuum wrote:
| To those seemingly confused by this:
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt
| jt2190 wrote:
| Here's the man page for finger:
|
| https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger
| pugworthy wrote:
| 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.)
| jeffbee wrote:
| The second one was the Netscape fish tank that you could watch by
| typing ctrl-alt-f.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 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.
| spindle wrote:
| 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 :-(
| romanhn wrote:
| 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.
| adventurer wrote:
| In case anyone is curious, the domain now hosts camgirl porn.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| austinjp wrote:
| Reminds me of lena.png
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
| jd3 wrote:
| 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
| jmspring wrote:
| FishCam was a requirement we put in when we moved to Zetta's
| offices near the Sunnyvale dump.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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.
| hughrr wrote:
| 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.
| atum47 wrote:
| I miss old internet so much.
| rhacker wrote:
| I think that's why we're on here so much.
| asdff wrote:
| Aging polar bears on the last piece of melting sea ice
| atatatat wrote:
| It's getting awfully chilly in these waters,
|
| and more icebergs are forming//smashing together every
| month!
| kilroy123 wrote:
| For some reason, I never realized that until this moment.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| 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.
| ancarda wrote:
| >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?
| jkestner wrote:
| The whirl of a network cable bustling with traffic.
| https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-
| technolo...
| technothrasher wrote:
| 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?
| dakna wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > 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!
| zinckiwi wrote:
| 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?
| mey wrote:
| 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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
| WalterBright wrote:
| I am not nostalgic for CRTs. Not even remotely. I sat behind
| one for 20 years.
| kloch wrote:
| Cats miss CRT's a lot more than we do
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| Finger, .plan and .project, talk, email, netnews... Unix
| _was_ social media.
| anthk wrote:
| Tildes exist today with that premise. Bullshit free social
| _collaboration_ and thinkering.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| (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.
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| 0x456 wrote:
| 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
| tgtweak wrote:
| I guess we're just going to gloss over how much of a
| terrible thing Novell Netware and Lotus Notes were to
| sysadmin :D
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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.
| smhenderson wrote:
| What you call terrible I called job security.
| pimlottc wrote:
| > The whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up.
|
| Nothing beats a good degaussing, ah...
| jimmaswell wrote:
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| BoingBoing (the source of this story) is one of those places
| that has withstood the test of time.
| Namidairo wrote:
| 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/
| dentalperson wrote:
| 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.
| spargosto wrote:
| Coffee makes the world go round
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| 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.
| spargosto wrote:
| asdas
| mmmBacon wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| 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.
| dls2016 wrote:
| 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.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| What has not been done before may not be inherently difficult,
| but the creativity part is since it hasn't been done before.
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(page generated 2021-09-15 23:00 UTC)