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   vga256 (vga256@dialup.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 17-Aug-2024 02:12:47 JST vga256

   • Quentin Stafford-Fraser

   buried in my 30 year old copy of NSCA Mosaic alpha was a bookmarked hyperlink to a university of cambridge (uk) live webcam of a coffee pot, brewing in the Trojan Room computing lab

   while live coffee/lab cams were not uncommon in the mid 90s, this one is fascinating for a few reasons:

   - it was up and running in 1991, predating the graphical world wide web by a few years
   - it ran over the MSNL protocol using a telecom network standard called ATM, which was a competitor to ethernet
   - an entire machine was dedicated to grabbing a frame from the camera, compressing it, and uploading to the web server: an Acorn Archimedes 🔥
   - the exact URL stored in Mosaic still resolves today, and the web page hasn't changed in 30 years

   https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

   more history of the setup here:
   https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.html

   more images of the sacred pot by @quentinsf here:
   https://statusq.org/archives/2024/07/11/12127/

   #retroComputing #worldWideWeb #webPreservation

   • Embed this notice
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Saturday, 17-Aug-2024 02:22:16 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Quentin Stafford-Fraser
     @vga256 @quentinsf One thing I wonder is how it worked on the electronics side of things, it's non-technical biography says there's a framegrabber, so I guess it used a digital camera? (Seems kind of advanced for the time)
   • Embed this notice
     tom jennings (tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Saturday, 17-Aug-2024 02:27:50 JST tom jennings

     in reply to

     • Mr Cool

     @mrcool @vga256

     In 1994 I put up a fake toilet camera in our house. TIME magazine referenced it as one of the signs of the collapse of culture or something.

     Was on WPS.COM (down name sold in 2014).

     https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/ToiletScam/index.html

     The live camera was really 3 or 4 stills, dark to light, taken with the Connectix and changed via crontab.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Mr Cool (mrcool@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Saturday, 17-Aug-2024 02:28:00 JST Mr Cool

     in reply to

     @vga256 Good old times. I do remember how exciting it was to watch the first low-quality #webcams around the world.
     I should still have a few saved images of early webcams, like one showing a street corner in LA. I certainly don't have saved an image of the coffee pot.

   • Embed this notice
     Quentin Stafford-Fraser (quentinsf@mastodon.me.uk)'s status on Saturday, 17-Aug-2024 02:28:32 JST Quentin Stafford-Fraser

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan @vga256 I’m pretty sure it was a video camera, in the sense that it produced a rastered output suitable for feeding to a CRT monitor or camcorder or whatever. So a framegrabber card in the computer read that signal through a fast A-to-D converter and captured a frame of video into its RAM, which could then be read out. My memory is that digital *stills* cameras didn’t, in general, come until a few years later.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.