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

[Barrow, Zach]

Thanks for the info!  Those are exactly the type of leads I'm looking for!

-Zach

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David P. Reed [mailto:dpreed at reed.com]
> Sent: Friday, March 25, 2005 6:25 AM
> To: Barrow, Zach
> Cc: Internet History List (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: [ih] Proof of the date of first use of term "webcam"
> 
> 
> 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.
>