Webcam Photos From Years Past

I recently discovered that I had amassed thousands of webcam pictures from 1997 to the present.

I have webcam pictures from earlier than 1997, starting in 1994, but if they are not forever lost then I simply can not find them now. Hard drives were not as cheap and generously appointed as today, so storing large numbers of images was not realistic (for me, at least).

Rather then let this large quantity of web camera photos molder in off-line obscurity I decided to let them molder in online obscurity by posting them here, where I predict 90% of these images will never be seen by human eyes. I will add to this series as time and common sense permit, starting with 1997 and eventually reaching the present day.

For the joy of randomness I also will link to arbitrary events documented to have occurred on the days these webcam shots were taken. The January 29, 1997 page, for instance, links to a few events, including a story about the winner of the 1996 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.

I have looked through most of these, making sure nothing pornographic or otherwise embarrassing gets posted. Looking at these pictures summons a mix of reactions. The tedium and directionlessness of my corporate youth does start to torment me at times, but not too much.

Webcams have become something of a ho-hum cliché, but in the mid and late 1990s they were not so common. Partly because of this I was once featured in a New York newspaper in a story about Internet webcams. I can not remember if the story was in Newsday or the Daily News, but it was one of those papers, and I think the story would have run in 1997 or 1998.

A photographer came over to this apartment and took several shots of me staring into a camcorder. One of those pictures of my face wound up blasted across nearly two full pages of the newspaper.

I once had a drawer full of old webcams, but I recently got rid of most of them. I still have my first black and white Connectix Quickcam, which I keep for sentimental reasons. Most of my webcams have been Quickcams, but I also tried a Kodak DVC 325 and a 3Com HomeConnect, and Play Inc.'s Snappy Video Snapshot device that connected my camcorder to a serial port.

I currently have two webcams in my home, and I activate them as whimsy strikes.

One camera is pointed out my window at my car, or whose ever car is parked outside. I call it CarCam. The other cam sits atop my computer monitor and pictures from that camera get posted to my webcams section. :