The original Netscape fishcam http://www.fishcam.com/ has gone through several iterations of cameras. It started on a SGI indy with a camera that came with the computer. It then moved to a portable video camera that was fairly old at the time, but had an analog RCA output and was encoded by the SGI. Now it runs on a Stardot NetCam SC5IR The Startdot camera is an embedded linux computer with a 5 MP video camera and high quality interchangeable lenses. The fact that it is a linux machine means you can do lots of creative things, like run a small web server, FTP, NFS, CIFS, scripts, etc. The most important aspect about a camera in my mind is its reliability. I don't want to reset the thing ever if possible. The Stardot has been running for more than a year uninterrupted. The big problem with Stardot cameras is the price. My SC5IR is over $1000 with all the accessories. A cheaper alternative is to set up a video server and use cheap security cameras with CGA resolution. You can get security cameras for $100 each and a cheap video card for ~$200.

Go Fishcam!

Cookies? Never heard of them. They are nothing, really. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain....

In the pre WWW era, Gopher ruled because there wasn't a better alternative. The big complaint was the lack of layout control and flexibility for expansion. Lynx came about as a fusion of the Gopher network protocol and a hypertext interface. Eventually Lynx adopted HTTP and HTML as additional methods and became an extremely popular Web browser. (More users than any of the individual Mosaic browsers.) There was a strong demand for better layout and flexibility and regardless of what network administrators wanted, these features would have evolved.