[ih] Proof of the date of first use of term "webcam"

[David P. Reed]

Regarding the term, webcam, rather than people's focus on video at the 
router level (not suprising since there are few apps layer people on 
this list, apparently), I would ask several people:

1. At Interval Research in 1993-1994 we spoke to many people and groups 
who were putting up webcams -  cameras "on the web" (which means cameras 
that generated Web-browser viewable pictures, *not* video streaming, but 
"webcams") - that is camera servers that generated GIF images on demand 
via web servers with appropriate HTML.  Marc Davis (now a prof. at 
UCBerkeley) was one of the students interested in that, as were many 
others in the collaborative work community.   Andrew Singer and Brenda 
Laurel were certainly involved in inviting people to share those ideas 
with us.

2. Many of the early "webcams" of this sort were based on the original 
Macintosh hosted Connectix cameras (as were the servers mentioned 
above).   Since the term "webcam" is of interest (as opposed to some 
kind of pride of place for people from the protocol streaming people 
thinking about movies over the net), I'd track back the hacker 
literature on how to get images out of old Connectix cameras for a 
clue.   Don't believe academics when they claim credit for stuff that 
may have first been demonstrated at a Hackers' Conference....  :-)

3. In the early days of Wired Magazine, the "Tired/Wired" column 
actually was generated by the people involved in inventing ideas in the 
first place.  Later it became a PR-hype-driven thing.   In particular, 
there's a 50-50 chance that Webcam was mentioned explicitly as a "new 
term" in that column, and in the early days, each term was credited to a 
specific individual contributor who passed the term on to the Wired 
compiler.   I knew many of the contributors personally, and in most 
cases those contributors were reporting neologisms very close to the 
time of invention.   You can probably find a person who would remember 
by looking for the actual term "webcam" when it first appeared in that 
Wired Column.