First Ever Webcam to Come Offline 91
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:Telling the grandkids (Score:1)
old timers (Score:2)
Future looks dim for Cambridge Computing (Score:1)
Someone should start an online petition to make sure that not only does the coffee stay in Cambridge computing, but that the web-cam stays up to so that those of us around the world can have supreme confidence in the coding abilities of those stationed at Cambridge.
Re:Coffee cam is cool? Speak for yourself (Score:4)
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...
* * *
Re:The new building (Score:1)
The Useless pages (Score:2)
I've been following the useless pages [go2net.com] for years now. It captures the spirit of the net far better than a dozen Gartner analysts thrown in a bin. Check out the history, and all the old stuff. I wish someone would archive all these things that are REALLY important, before they disappear.
The first popular use of printing was to cater to porn or astrology. It's pathetic the way mainstream media journalists heap scorn on new things appearing on the net, and then desperately try to catch on and "get it".
Save it before it goes.
w/m
I remember when... (Score:1)
Beer Cam. (Score:1)
Save The CoffeeCam!!! (Score:2)
A Replacement Wouldn't Be the Same (Score:3)
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.
Re:Ah Yes, I remember it well... (Score:1)
Truly a Sad Day... (Score:1)
If no one else is going to do it, Slashdot should make it's own timeline of the internet with all the "really important" happenings on it.
One of the first Linux Webcams (Score:3)
Re:I was a shock troop in the Internet Revolution? (Score:1)
Re:At least we still have (Score:3)
Re:Coffee cam is cool? Speak for yourself (Score:1)
Coffee Cam and FishCam should be preserved! (Score:1)
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Re:The first network-enabled vending machine (Score:1)
Re:At least we still have (Score:1)
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:1)
(in case you're wondering, I found out when a friend was setting up a webcam... It had to have 2 different apps to run the netscape and non-netscape servers...)
Re:At least we still have (Score:1)
Re:CATS: All your base are belong to us (Score:1)
Re:A moment of silence. (Score:2)
Reminds me of the (even older, I believe) CMU Coke Machine [cmu.edu]. As far back as 1982 they had a finger interface [cmu.edu] set up to check the status of the Coke machine on the 3rd floor of Wean hall. The machine could tell you not only which buttons currently had soda, but how relatively cold they were based on when sodas had been dispensed out of each column. Unfortunately it looks like they're in the process of moving the machine right now, but it certainly was convenient back in the day.
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:3)
Slashdotted (Score:1)
When I was in Cambridge… (Score:2)
Re:C'mon Taco... (Score:3)
"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.
Really (Score:2)
Re:Stanford??? (Score:1)
Re:Future looks dim for Cambridge Computing (Score:1)
No, the problem with the old building was (is) that is was in a tower that was fairly tall and thin, so lots of stair-climbing was required. The new building is nice and flat (3 fairly large floors) in West Cambridge [cam.ac.uk].
However, as someone pointed out, it is The William Gates Building. Microsoft Research were going to take the top floor, but have now decided, due to expansion, that they need their own building next door.
The original plans were quite fun, as the MS Research and Computer Lab parts of the building were completely separated by card-only doors...
Don't look now... (Score:1)
When will the horror end? :)
If only (Score:2)
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:1)
I just tried it on Netscape 1.1 and it worked too.
Yes, I still actively use Netscape 1.1, although not interactively. I use it for monitoring the health of a remote server by pointing it to an auto-refreshing status page.
--
Re:I'll miss the Coffee Cam (Score:1)
they should donate it to the smithsonian... (Score:1)
RA7
-
prior webcam (?) (Score:3)
Hypercard (Score:1)
But, does it really work well? (Score:3)
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...
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:1)
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:1)
A cup of good old xvcoffee (Score:1)
These technology demonstrators may seem trite to the unititiated eye, but every new research area starts with baby steps.
Pointing it at the coffee pot was a bit of a joke, the entire distance from the CL tower through to the Cockcroft building is only 50 to 100 yards - research people are allowed to have fun too!
The next stop after visiting the Coffee Cam... (Score:1)
Anyone? (Score:1)
Another first (Score:4)
I was a shock troop in the Internet Revolution? (Score:1)
...To Coming Offline (Score:1)
Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:3)
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).
--
Re:...To Coming Offline (Score:1)
The new building (Score:2)
William Gates Building. No kidding.
--
On the BBC (Score:3)
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?
--
I was there when . . . (Score:2)
. . . they took freedom of speech away from the Internet.
------
Albert Einsten? (Score:1)
Probably when people complaining about grammar mistakes will start to check their own spelling.
--
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:1)
Firstly, I'm not sure that meta tags had been invented then, and secondly, you originally used to view the coffee pot using the 'xcoffee' application which used the video grabbing and streaming stuff that Cambridge Uni and Olivetti Research were playing about with at the time.
Ah, those were the days... ;-)
Inspired me to make my own (Score:2)
I decided to make my own webcam then using a old black and white survailence camera and and a very expensive framegrabber card on ISA bus. The card was slow and drivers where almost nonexistent, but the documentation for the hardware was good and I was a little hardware hacker at the time so somehow I got it working. (btw. I just saw my old boss at a party and we talked about just how I convinced him to spend money on it since it was paid by the company and it provided no serios use for them whatsoever
Anyway, I wrote all the programming for it myself as there were no webcam software available. It was the first webcam in Denmark, and I had up to 1000 visitors pr day(in 1996, which I think was pretty good at the time for a personal homepage. The cam has been online since about 96(I think) in many different setups.
The first setup was a coffeecam much like the original except that I also made a small browser in visual basic so that I had a small resizable window. Version 2 of my coffeecam included a switch on the coffeemachine that would be triggered when someone took some coffee, the pc that grabbed the pictures would then store pictures of the times when people took coffee so we could see who took the last drop without putting on a new batch.
Today my camera is a old Connectix Quickcam(on parallel port) on a server running FreeBSD.
My camera is available on the web [www.rud.dk] most of the time as well on your WAP phone on wap.rud.dk. I really don't know why I am running the camera today(and must admit that I forgot to plug it in yesterday when I moved the server around) but at least there is something that gets updated on my site.
The downside of using a old parallel port cam is that is uses too much CPU time(100% in 4 seconds for 1 picture) so the cronjobs that takes the picure only runs every 5 minutes because I don't want to waste cpu time on it.
Oh well, I must be going home from work now, so that I can get home and read
hmm
--------
Some things don't change... (Score:1)
picture of the coffe pot. Too much traffic I
suspect. Reliabilty of service or the lack of
continues to be major issue with the Web (servers
and Internet connectivity included).
As for Banner Ad's, I don't see any (thanks to
filtering software such as AdSubtract).
Re:Save The CoffeeCam!!! (Score:1)
The TRCM was the first website I ever visited in 1993. Using Mosaic. In Edinburgh.
That was fun.
~Tim
--
Who cares? (Score:1)
The day the pot was stolen (Score:2)
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:1)
Re:The Useless pages (Score:1)
I've found it probable that the URL for the useless pages page I'm thinking of was "http://www.primus.com/staff/paulp/useless.html" but it isn't there anymore. =/
Anyone know?... anyone have any mirrors/anything of the original site?
--
Re:Coffee cam is cool? Speak for yourself (Score:1)
Except it runs of an Archimedes, not a Mac.
Re:But, does it really work well? (Score:1)
Re:What's next!? (Score:1)
might as well cut the backbone
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:1)
I thought it was gone; it doesn't work on my SPARC Solaris 4.76 version of Netscape...
--
At least we still have (Score:2)
The first network-enabled vending machine (Score:3)
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 pony@sail.stanford.edu" 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 pony@sail.stanford.edu" still returns
[sail.stanford.edu]
Login name: pony
In real life: Prancing Pony
Directory:
Last login Fri Aug 25, 1995 on ttypc from xenon.stanford.edu
No Plan.
Archive it! (Score:2)
The coffee pot page is pretty much a 'milestone' in Internet history... I think it should be saved in the Internet Archive [archive.org] or some place similar to that. archive.org is already saving lots of old www pages [archive.org] in its archive.
And they've taken the Fish Corridor cam down too.. (Score:1)
this moment reminds me of a song (Score:1)
softly glows the light of day,
as the coffee brewer fades away.
silently each coder should ask,
have I done my daily task.
have I keeped my code so tight,
can I sleep without guit tonight.
solomly these moments past,
as I rest to morn the past.
ONEPOINT
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
please help me make it better
Re:Grammar Police: Coming Offline? (Score:1)
What's next!? (Score:2)
I'll miss the Coffee Cam (Score:5)
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
Ah Yes, I remember it well... (Score:1)
I recall calling all my office co-workers in and showing them. They were utterly amazed!
Don't have the time to check it out this morning as I got a plane to catch, but can someone tell me...
...how many banner ads does it have?
Re:...To Coming Offline (Score:1)
Are you kidding? We'll all be dead by then and our grand children will be in their 50s when it happens.
Raneswsin
Re:What's next!? (Score:3)
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:4)
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.
A moment of silence. (Score:2)
On a slightly ironic note, looking at the banner ad (yeah, I look at them from time to time, but I never inhale), I see, you guessed it, the ad for the webcam that TG's pushing. Coincidence, I think not!
Re:Future looks dim for Cambridge Computing (Score:1)
Am I really this old? (Score:1)
Webcams (Score:2)
Re:I'll miss the Coffee Cam (Score:1)
A quick check at: Tucows [tucows.com] shows that their are still "dozens" of browsers to choose from. At least on my OS, you are running windows aren't you?
Get the groove... (Score:2)
Must be University of Cambridge (Score:1)
Grrr... makes one want to take direct action! (Only kidding, CU authorities).
I suppose they only did it for the money...
Re:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam (Score:1)
Re:Some things don't change... (Score:1)
Odd - works fine here! (I'm accessing it over the LAN, though...)
Too much traffic I suspect. Reliabilty of service or the lack of continues to be major issue with the Web (servers and Internet connectivity included).
Unlikely; that server sits on a brand new OC-48 (well, STM-16, being in Europe)...
As for Banner Ad's, I don't see any (thanks to filtering software such as AdSubtract).
No possibility of banner ads on this site, either: one of the very few rules on our servers is "no ads"! (This is a university, remember: we get cheaper Net access, on the understanding it's for educational/personal use only.)
RFC2324! (Score:2)
money maker (Score:1)
something old is something new (Score:1)
we are working on a robotic webcam microserver [iomojo.com] that uses http push, bt878 card, linux, php, mysql, apache, some l337 scriptz & this amazing little pan tilt cam [iomojo.com] check out an online demo [vidcard.com]
-mind... different...
Re:Get the groove... (Score:1)
Makes me long for a time when the web wasn't littered with lawyers.
Re:Ah Yes, I remember it well... (Score:1)
It had precisely zero.
Re:C'mon Taco... (Score:1)