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Comment by mmmBacon | Hacker News Reader

I recall those days and hard to fathom today why this was such a big deal. Was really hard to do anything like this back in those days.

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I remember looking at the coffee cam and not thinking "wow, a live camera on the web" but rather "they pointed the camera at their coffee pot, that's weird". So the notion that someone would put a video camera feed on the internet was at the time completely uninteresting. Video over networks was a thing that had existed for years prior. That someone had written a script to frame-grab into a file that was underneath a server, accessible over the network, was not new or novel. I bet it had been done many times before. I think this is a good example of how history can be somewhat bogus. It makes a great story to say that the coffee pot cam was the world's first webcam, because a) the people involved wrote about it and b) a webcam is a thing we recognize today. But back then nobody would have thought of a thing called a webcam because while cameras on computers were not uncommon, they were quite expensive, and nobody (to a first approximation) had a connection fast enough to practically use them. Nobody really considered "the web" in the humanity-changing way that we see it today. People used Compuserve and AOL and the internet/web was possibly going to take off with regular folks, but who knew exactly how things were going to play out.

> So the notion that someone would put a video camera feed on the internet was at the time completely uninteresting.

This is the most “future is already here – just not very evenly distributed” quote I’ve ever seen. :)

> cameras on computers were not uncommon

In 1994?! Name two, please.

The first widely known laptop with integrated webcam option, at a pricepoint starting at US$12,000, was an IBM RS/6000 860 laptop and his ThinkPad 850 sibling, released in 1996.[1]

As I recall, even though there was at least one commercial webcam available in 1994, it was very uncommon for anyone to have an external webcam connected to their computer even up to 1998-2000, let alone a built-in camera. Certainly there were "pioneers," those with interest that always had the new doodads, but I would not remotely describe them as "not uncommon." They were precisely uncommon, i.e. maybe 5% or less of home computer users had a webcam prior to 1998.

You know, not being impressed isn't a virtue or anything, and it isn't a crime nor even a character flaw to be impressed, even if mildly, on occasion.

Also, let's not conflate the Internet with the WWW. First streaming webcam is a decent woop, especially considering that beyond processor, resolution, bandwidth increases and new protocols, not much has changed, the evolution has stalled. Though every device today has a built-in camera, one might expect there to be a layer of the Internet dedicated to video, but there is not. The best we have even today are video posting sites, and sites of live webcam directories, when there should be something better by now, some sort of seamless integration of all the live cameras, perhaps like in that Batman movie.

[1] some wiki

I said cameras on computers, as in connected with a wire. I worked on such systems all the way back to the 1980s. There was a type of card (that I designed once) called a frame grabber. You connected a stock 1v video signal to said card.

The coffee cam was such a thing. It wasn't a "webcam" as in a thing made by logitec sitting on top of the LCD monitor, connected via USB. None of those things existed in 1993. But cameras on computers did, and had done for years and years. Heck even video phones existed.

What has not been done before may not be inherently difficult, but the creativity part is since it hasn't been done before.

I remember trying to use CU-SeeMe at some point in maybe 1995 but not ever doing so successfully.

And sharing video was a PITA until YouTube, essentially.

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