First Ever Webcam to Come Offline

sidetrack writes: "According to an article in The Times, Cambridge University Computer Laboratory's famous coffee pot camera - allegedly the world's first web cam (indeed, it predated the web by a few years in its original form) is to be retired, when the department moves to a new building. I think I remember looking at this some time in '95 - a piece of internet history that really should be saved, IMHO ;-)." Bits and pieces of history guys. It frightens me to realize that all this stuff we thought was so cool just a few years ago is now part of the net's history and lore. Tell your grandkids that you were there when...

Re:Coffee cam is cool? Speak for yourself

Its not cool, its boring and more than a little bit sad. Wow, a picture of a coffee machine! Err , and? Who the hell cares? Would anyone sit and watch a CCTV picture of a coffee machine?

Well, that seems like the point...
Would I sit at my desk today, staring at a picture of a coffee pot? No. Did I, in 1994 or 95, find myself really struck by the fact that a cheap little Mac was showing me (almost) real-time images from England? Yes, I did.

Was I, after watching the coffee pot for a while, happy to realize there were people all over the world who were interested in what you could do with these machines, and didn't care whether the end result was "important" or not? Absolutely!

Did I then spend too much time visiting the Web-enabled refrigerator [hamjudo.com], the site that let you display messages on an LED board, the Abductalizer [alienabductions.com], and Web cams in a wide variety of uninteresting places? Well...yes. And I'll admit, that part was a little pathetic.

Oh, well. I for one will be sorry to see the coffee pot go...

* * *

A Replacement Wouldn't Be the Same

With the move to the new building, the CUCL will probably (finally) get to have their very own coffee pot within their department. Hence, when Mr. Coder gets thirsty (or needs a jolt to get the neurons moving), all he has to do is glance over his shoulder to the counter and see that yes, indeed, there is coffee to be had. No more checking up on the web to prevent a wasted trip to an empty pot. Simply put, there is no need for the CoffeeCam anymore. Plus, the CoffeeCam obviously requires occasional, perhaps even often, maintenance; time which could be better spent advancing "the cause" (whatever that may be).

Certainly, CUCL could place a new cam on this new coffe pot, but it wouldn't be the same. Why not? Because the purpose, the whole reason for its existence, will be a farce. It won't exist to ease the lives of coders, but to sate the curiosity of Internet hitchikers who have nothing better to do than waste the precious bandwidth of an already-taxed not-for-profit organization of higher education.

That said, CUCL should have a CoffeeCam history page, explaining what it was, why it was, and why it is no more. This for the sake of posterity and public record.

One of the first Linux Webcams

One of the first Linux quickcams [eunuchs.org] is still up and running (more or less) since 1994 and the page describes a good deal about how to do it.

Re:At least we still have

I went to inspect "The Really Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything" only to find it does do something. It refreshes the page. Now they have to rename the site to "The Really Big Button That Does ONE Thing" or possibly "The Really Big Button That We Told People Did Nothing, But In Fact Does And Always Has Done Something"

Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam

Ctrl-Alt-F. It works with Netscape 4.0 and later, and Mozilla.

Re:C'mon Taco...

Clarification!

"First Ever Webcam" to Come Offline.
not
First Ever "Webcam To Come Offline."

Besides, I liked the original headline: "First Ever Webcam to Coming Offline." Heh. I think this whole "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" craziness might be having an unanticpated adverse effect on the already languishing grammar of the 'Net.

I, for one, will mourn the loss of the coffee cam, not for lack of other stupid things to look at on the Internet, but for its role as an innovator. Doing something not because it's particularly earth shattering or useful, but just because you can. Geek chic!

--- [DrPsycho [zombo.com]] Coping with reality since 1975.

prior webcam (?)

I believe the webcams at MIT's TNS research group [mit.edu] may have been first. I seem to remember viewing the TNS people remotely in 94, but you may want to double check on that. The TNS Technology Demonstrations [mit.edu] page has been up for many many years.

But, does it really work well?

I mean, setting up a camera on the communal coffee pot rocks; you don't have to drag your butt halfway across the building to just to find an empty coffee pot.

This could mean that coffee would never be made, though... If everyone can see that the coffee pot was empty, then no one would want to be the one to schlep down to the pot, start a new pot brewing and wait around for it to finish. Everyone would wait for everyone else to do it. All productive work would stop. Everyone would just watch the damn coffee pot...

Now, if you could get a more sophisticated cam, one that would snap a picture of the rotten bastard who took the last cup without starting a new pot... now that would be progress...

Another first

The first coffee port in the world to get slashdotted!

Coffee Cam and Fish Cam

The two earliest 'cam's that I knew of were the Coffee Cam and the Fish Cam [netscape.com]. I think there even used to be a hidden key sequence in Netscape to bring the Fish Cam up (something like Alt-Ctrl-Shift-F). If I remember correctly, the first ones were simply pages with Meta Refresh statements in them, and then once Netscape 1.1 came out (supported animated GIFs), they started doing things that way.

Ahh, but that was years ago. Funny, that's only about 7 years ago, but it still feels like an eternity (in internet time, at least).

--

On the BBC

This is such big news it was mentioned on the BBC's Breakfast News programme this morning!

Jeremy Bowen read out the URL so that people could see while it's still there, and nearly ran out of breath! How good it is that a legend like CoffeeCam (ahem) hasn't gone the way of the rest of the web, and will in fact reture without having registered a domain...

www.coffeecam.org anyone?

--

The first network-enabled vending machine

The first network-enabled vending machine was at the Stanford AI lab in the 1970s. I wrote the item below a decade ago.

The Stanford CS department has had the "Prancing Pony Cooperative", a computer-controlled vending machine, for almost two decades. It's in the third floor lounge of Margret Jacks Hall now, although it once lived at the Power Lab, the original Stanford AI Lab site. It used to be directly connected to the SAIL DEC-20 mainframe, but when SAIL was retired, it was defunct for a while, and it's now connected to the UNIX box that replaced SAIL.

It's basically a payment system; if you have an account, you can buy things and charge them to your account. The machine has an early-model laptop attached to the front (replacing a Teletype KSR-35) for this purpose. Unfortunately, the vending machine doesn't have any sensors that provide user-useful info you could query via the net. It's one of those old turntable-and-doors type machines, where you push the button to rotate the turntable until something you want is behind a door, then pay. The machine doesn't know if it is full or empty.

You can type "finger [e-mail]" for some info, and users of that machine can check their account balances.

John Nagle

The Pony is long gone. No idea where it ended up. The famous SAIL system is long gone as well; today "sail.stanford.edu" is just the workgroup server for McCarthy's group at Stanford. But "finger [e-mail]" still returns

• finger [e-mail]
• 
  [sail.stanford.edu]
  Login name: pony
  In real life: Prancing Pony
  Directory: /u/pony Shell: /bin/tcsh
  Last login Fri Aug 25, 1995 on ttypc from xenon.stanford.edu
  No Plan.

I'll miss the Coffee Cam

Way back in the "good old days", I remember the first browser I ran (remember when there were dozens to choose from?), and I was looking for websites that seemed like they might be interesting. When I saw the Coffee Cam, the little lightbulb in my head finally went off - it was the first real application I had seen that used any of the web's potential. Sure, cameras had been networked before (as had that coffee pot), but the Coffee Cam was the first thing I saw that took advantage of the ability of a browser to handle mixed media in a manner suitable for virtually any platform. Before the cam, web pages were mostly just text with in-line graphics - there were no interactive or dynamic elements.

By itself, it didn't do much (I mean, it was just a refreshing picture of a coffee pot), but it was the direct precursor of a lot of things we now take for granted.

It was also arguably (along with the Fish Cam) the immediate ancestor of JenniCam, and all the other webcams out there. As for me, it encouraged me to give up HyperCard for HTML.

- -Josh Turiel

Re:What's next!?

Actually, according the their history page [cmu.edu], it did go off line for a while during the eighties. So maybe this is a good precedent that we will once agin see the beloved Cambridge coffee pot at some future date.

> In the mid-seventies expansion of the department caused people's
> offices to be located ever further away from the main terminal room
> where the Coke machine stood. It got rather annoying to traipse down
> to the third floor only to find the machine empty - or worse, to shell
> out hard-earned cash to receive a recently loaded, still-warm Coke.
> One day a couple of people got together to devise a solution.
>
> They installed micro-switches in the Coke machine to sense how many
> bottles were present in each of its six columns of bottles. The
> switches were hooked up to CMUA, the PDP-10 that was then the main
> departmental computer. A server program was written to keep tabs on
> the Coke machine's state, including how long each bottle had been in
> the machine. When you ran the companion status inquiry program, you'd
> get a display that might look like this:
>
> EMPTY EMPTY 1h 3m
> COLD COLD 1h 4m
>
> This let you know that cold Coke could be had by pressing the
> lower-left or lower-center button, while the bottom bottles in the two
> right-hand columns had been loaded an hour or so beforehand, so were
> still warm. (I think the display changed to just "COLD" after the
> bottle had been there 3 hours.)
>
> The final piece of the puzzle was needed to let people check Coke
> status when they were logged in on some other machine than CMUA. CMUA's
> Finger server was modified to run the Coke status program whenever
> someone fingered the nonexistent user "coke". (For the uninitiated,
> Finger normally reports whether a specified user is logged in, and if
> so where.) Since Finger requests are part of standard ARPANET (now
> Internet) protocols, people could check the Coke machine from any CMU
> computer by saying "finger coke@cmua". In fact, you could discover the
> Coke machine's status from any machine anywhere on the Internet! Not
> that it would do you much good if you were a few thousand miles away...

Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam

NS1.1 didn't do animated GIFs as we know them today. The Fish Cam used a multipart MIME stream to tell the browser "wait, there's another file coming" and Netscape would happily replace the currently displayed GIF with the next chunk of the stream. You could even control the reload delay by simply having the server wait a few seconds before sending the next chunk. Proper GIF animations didn't show up until NS 2.0.

Neat trick for its time. I tried resurrecting this technique recently, to do a splash page of cycling random images (I'd just given up trying to do it with dhtml), and couldn't make it work properly on the current crop of browsers. Maybe I was doing something wrong.