Right, I remember watching the "stream" over our 64 kbps link at the university.
But I think the IndyCam was the first one that was commercially available as a computer accessory, though not exactly affordable back then... still, my students today are amazed to learn that color video conferencing and 3D graphics were possibly almost 30 years ago on a machine that's much slower than an original Raspberry Pi.
The TC255 is a frame-transfer charge-coupled device (CCD) designed for use in B/W NTSC TV and special-purpose applications where low cost and small size are desired. The image-sensing area of the TC255 is configured in 243 lines with 336 elements in each line.
It's a DIL through-hole package with just 8 pins. The output is analog. I wonder how they implemented the A/D conversion and the frame/line buffering.
It's amazing how breakthroughs in the past now seem trivial. Everything has gotten so much easier/cheaper. A hobbyist can do what took quite a bit of funding back in the 80s/90s.
The frame buffering is a physical feature of the CCD. It actually has twice the number of lines, but half of them are behind a mask so they will never be exposed. When the exposure ends, it rapidly shifts the accumulated electrons from the exposed lines into the area with unexposed lines. From there, they can be read out by the ADC while another exposure is in progress.
Yeah, Connectix was such a cool company when I was growing up. It feels like they launched so many possibilities for computers that weren't really thought of at the time. The fact they even emulated the PlayStation in a retail product is kind of incredible.
Back in the pre OS X days, you had to pre allocate a block memory that could be used by each app. You set how much memory could be used for an app in its Get Info dialog. Since each block was assigned at launch, you could have plenty of memory available, but as you launched and quit apps, your memory could be “fragmented” so the next app that was launched didn’t have enough contiguous memory.
You would have to quit and relaunch apps so you had enough continuous memory.
The second issue was that you needed to have as much hard drive space available as you wanted to use for swap. For instance, I had 10MB RAM on my old LCII with an 80MB hard drive. If I wanted to have 15 Mb of “virtual memory” that took up 15MB of my hard drive the minute I configured it.
RAM Doubler on the Mac replaced the built in memory management system with a more traditional one. Instead of pre-allocating Photoshop for instance 4MB of RAM you could preallocate more memory and RAM Doubler would make it seem contiguous.
On another note, after the PPC Macs came out, RAM Doubler was bundled with Speed Doubler that replaced the built in 68K emulator with a much faster one.
> Virtual Game Station: PlayStation emulation software. Sold to Sony, who bought it only after their lawsuit to stop it failed, and then dropped the product immediately.
Ah, the invisible hand of the free market at work.
Wow. I remember plugging in the first one I got to a Mac IIfx, as well as fiddling with the parallel port on PCs.
Setting up NetMeeting over ISDN using a later model (and, later , an Intel capture board, but I recall the VC QuickCam now, it was the first USB model) was partly what got me into telco:
I talked the boss into a purchase order for one to explore “video conferencing.”
Connected it to my Mac IIci and experimented with CU-SeeMe. Blew my mind seeing folks in other countries, had only been using the net for ~6 mos. Later took shots every minute or so. Also had a web server running with cgi script that took a text input. You could see if I was at my desk from the page and sent me a spoken message.
Mostly recived animal noises and profanity however. :-D
A few years later when the webcam market had exploded, I remember always insisting on using Hauppauge WinTV cameras and capture cards, since those were real TV signal (i.e. PAL or NTSC) video cameras, and would guarantee a crisp TV resolution with usable TV framerates, unlike most webcams which were often terrible resolutions and/or atrocious framerates, and had strange proprietary signals and/or connectors, coupled with strange Windows-only drivers. The early USB cameras were before USB had the necessary bandwitdh, too, so this advice was good for many years. Hauppauge also had good Linux drivers.
I setup a cu-see me server at my college with one of these running on a A/UX Quadra 950 box. Let it go for a weekend and came back to user reports of it being used for porn. I see a lot of similar comments here about that. lol.
Because it was a black and white camera, it only had a single IR filter which was easy to remove. The bare silicon sensor, unhindered by RGB color filters, had surprisingly good near-IR performance. We rigged up a bunch of IR LEDs and had a pretty good night vision webcam.
I still have mine in the parts bin. Some day I should find a parallel port and try using it again to see how terrible it really was. :)
I did a high school science fair project in computer vision on one of these in 1996-1997. I'm still bitter that Logitech bought them out and cancelled the Mac version of the product and to this day I won't buy Logitech products.
One of my classes in college (in ~2010) had us implement communication with one of those from raw C. Implementing the bitmap file format from scratch remains one of the cooler things I've done, which probably means I should do more random projects.
Had the QuickCam back in the day and it was so cool and futuristic to have a camera connected to the computer. It was fun making stop-motion videos with clay.
In these heady days of the mid-90s, I lived in Santa Cruz and worked as a consultant in Silicon Valley. I entrusted my girlfriend with all the toys that mattered, so naturally I picked up a QuickCam and we put it on her PC (although she had previously been an Amiga nerd).
She spent hours on Cu-SeeMe and most of that time was as a porn magnet. She absolutely attracted guys who immediately sent live dick pics. So how does my lovely girlfriend respond but to capture and catalog all of them. She absolutely screenshotted every single one of those pics as they came in; she didn't waste a lot of time engaging anyone, but her collection grew to epic proportions. I'm not entirely sure why she kept it around; it wasn't for blackmail or publication, that's for sure.
40 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadThe real first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
But I think the IndyCam was the first one that was commercially available as a computer accessory, though not exactly affordable back then... still, my students today are amazed to learn that color video conferencing and 3D graphics were possibly almost 30 years ago on a machine that's much slower than an original Raspberry Pi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix
https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/93863.pdf
The TC255 is a frame-transfer charge-coupled device (CCD) designed for use in B/W NTSC TV and special-purpose applications where low cost and small size are desired. The image-sensing area of the TC255 is configured in 243 lines with 336 elements in each line.
It's a DIL through-hole package with just 8 pins. The output is analog. I wonder how they implemented the A/D conversion and the frame/line buffering.
For Mac users it was one of the most incredible pieces of software ever.
Back in the pre OS X days, you had to pre allocate a block memory that could be used by each app. You set how much memory could be used for an app in its Get Info dialog. Since each block was assigned at launch, you could have plenty of memory available, but as you launched and quit apps, your memory could be “fragmented” so the next app that was launched didn’t have enough contiguous memory.
You would have to quit and relaunch apps so you had enough continuous memory.
The second issue was that you needed to have as much hard drive space available as you wanted to use for swap. For instance, I had 10MB RAM on my old LCII with an 80MB hard drive. If I wanted to have 15 Mb of “virtual memory” that took up 15MB of my hard drive the minute I configured it.
RAM Doubler on the Mac replaced the built in memory management system with a more traditional one. Instead of pre-allocating Photoshop for instance 4MB of RAM you could preallocate more memory and RAM Doubler would make it seem contiguous.
On another note, after the PPC Macs came out, RAM Doubler was bundled with Speed Doubler that replaced the built in 68K emulator with a much faster one.
Ah, the invisible hand of the free market at work.
https://youtu.be/CQIRJIiEJt0?t=48
Setting up NetMeeting over ISDN using a later model (and, later , an Intel capture board, but I recall the VC QuickCam now, it was the first USB model) was partly what got me into telco:
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/07/25/2030
Connected it to my Mac IIci and experimented with CU-SeeMe. Blew my mind seeing folks in other countries, had only been using the net for ~6 mos. Later took shots every minute or so. Also had a web server running with cgi script that took a text input. You could see if I was at my desk from the page and sent me a spoken message.
Mostly recived animal noises and profanity however. :-D
I still have mine in the parts bin. Some day I should find a parallel port and try using it again to see how terrible it really was. :)
She spent hours on Cu-SeeMe and most of that time was as a porn magnet. She absolutely attracted guys who immediately sent live dick pics. So how does my lovely girlfriend respond but to capture and catalog all of them. She absolutely screenshotted every single one of those pics as they came in; she didn't waste a lot of time engaging anyone, but her collection grew to epic proportions. I'm not entirely sure why she kept it around; it wasn't for blackmail or publication, that's for sure.