The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a coffee pot

https://www.openculture.com/2021/09/the-very-first-webcam-was-invented-to-keep-an-eye-on-a-coffee-pot-at-cambridge-university.html

by elorant • 5 years ago

295 119 5 years ago

openculture.com

0x4562• 5 years ago

Breakrooms also have a dark side:

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

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

lapetitejort• 5 years ago

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

asdff4• 5 years ago

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

beamatronic2• 5 years ago

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

dividuum• 5 years ago

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

jt2190• 5 years ago

Here’s the man page for finger:

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

mrweasel• 5 years ago

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.

beamatronic2• 5 years ago

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

pugworthy• 5 years ago

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 ship@oldman.hmsc.orst.edu was the call. "oldman" was the Sun workstation running the ships data systems, and "lubber" was the one on my desk.

atum47• 5 years ago

I miss old internet so much.

xtracto• 5 years ago

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

rhacker• 5 years ago

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

asdff4• 5 years ago

Aging polar bears on the last piece of melting sea ice

kilroy123• 5 years ago

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

huhtenberg• 5 years ago

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.

bitwize• 5 years ago

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

ethbr03• 5 years ago

(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.

technothrasher• 5 years ago

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?

jkestner• 5 years ago

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

HeyLaughingBoy3• 5 years ago

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!

pimlottc• 5 years ago

The whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up.

Nothing beats a good degaussing, ah...

ancarda• 5 years ago

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?

WalterBright2• 5 years ago

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

kortex• 5 years ago

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.

oh_sigh• 5 years ago

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.

TheSpiceIsLife• 5 years ago

The first internet connected toaster from 1990

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

mmmBacon• 5 years ago

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.

_boffin_• 5 years ago

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

dls2016• 5 years ago

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.

dboreham2• 5 years ago

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.

comex• 5 years ago

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. :)

Maursault• 5 years ago

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

romanhn• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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

gostsamo• 5 years ago

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

gumby• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Reminds me of lena.png

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

rasz2• 5 years ago

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

jeffbee• 5 years ago

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

dentalperson• 5 years ago

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.

Imnimo• 5 years ago

Nescafe is the mother of invention.

alasdair_• 5 years ago

Sure, if the invention is killing babies.

gorgoiler• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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 :-(

spargosto• 5 years ago

Coffee makes the world go round

eurasiantiger• 5 years ago

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.

kloch3• 5 years ago

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).

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

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

ubicomp• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

hoseja• 5 years ago

Webcam feed.

liamwire• 5 years ago

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

jalk• 5 years ago

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 :-)

jd3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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

jacquesm• 5 years ago

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 :)

altacc• 5 years ago

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

dylan604• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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

anyfoo2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

eichin• 5 years ago

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...

DoreenMichele• 5 years ago

"It's a kind of magic."

angrais• 5 years ago

Do you mean UK? As the article (and first webcam) was Cambridge, UK?

hadlock• 5 years ago

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

anyfoo2• 5 years ago

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.

Namidairo• 5 years ago

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/

mastazi2• 5 years ago

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.

gonehome• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

ajsharp• 5 years ago

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

kloch3• 5 years ago

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

mastazi2• 5 years ago

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

keithnz• 5 years ago

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.

rasz2• 5 years ago

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

AKluge• 5 years ago

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

renewiltord• 5 years ago

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.

evv• 5 years ago

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

ineedasername2• 5 years ago

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.

stakkur• 5 years ago

This guy fucks.

jqcoffey• 5 years ago

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!

misterkrabs• 5 years ago

How many times do I have to hear this? lol

seizethecheese• 5 years ago

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!

wombatmobile• 5 years ago

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...

dx034• 5 years ago

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

rcarmo• 5 years ago

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.

xtiansimon• 5 years ago

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

hermitsings2• 5 years ago

Near butter: first good robo invented to pass butter.

hermitsings2• 5 years ago

Typo: Near future

The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a coffee pot

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