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...

Comments

Re:Coffee cam is cool? Speak for yourself

[jonesvery]

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, the site that let you display messages on an LED board, the Abductalizer, 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...

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Another first

[Jenova]

The first coffee port in the world to get slashdotted!

I'll miss the Coffee Cam

[jht]

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:Coffee Cam and Fish Cam

[Squid]

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.