I just watched this video on YouTube that tells the tale of what's been regaled as the world's oldest webcam. I guess they really mean the oldest live stream via a webcam in continuous operation still extant but the former sounds a lot simpler.
It went "online" on September 30, 1994 when two students at San Francisco State University decided to connect their newfangled webcam to the "information superhighway" and though it's surely seen replacements in hardware over the years and its vantage point moved around the campus a few times, it has indeed been taking snapshots every twenty seconds, uploading them and allowing free and open access to anyone logging in on the World Wide Web.
Here's a "live" shot I just captured right now as I type this post at 7:20 am, it being 4:20 am Pacific. 420, San Fran, college kids and a useless webcam -- how apropos.
Gotta love the 1990s webpage look, too.
Here's the video:
So I whipped up a little self-created portmanteau for the title of this post mainly because, as the narrator in the clip explains, this old as fuck webcam doesn't keep any of the images it takes. Every twenty minutes, when a new shot is taken, the old one is replaced by the new, and the old one is gone forever. Well, unless either the crawler at Internet Archive happens to capture it during a random sweep, or, if any visitor, like I just did above, happens to grab a screenshot and saves it to their own media.
In the video, it's noted that in a research study published in 2024, 38% of webpages that existed from 2013 to 2023 were gone.
Internet + Ephemera = Netphemera
I hope they keep the webcam in the same position for a while. It looks like there's some construction about to happen out in the yard. Imagine if they kept it going for another 30 years, then another, then another? And if someone could assemble all the snapshots and compile them after, say, the Fogcam! Semiquincenntennial. In the year 2244.
It'd be nice to think we'd be able to see a lovely view out our humble Fogcam! I know back in 1994, I sure had a lot of hope for the future. Maybe there's a reason I tend to spend a lot of time lately looking lovingly to the past?