The World's Oldest Webcam Is Finally Being Shut Down After 25 Years


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The world’s oldest webcam is finally shutting down after a whopping quarter-century of service, marking the end of an era that began in the infancy of the modern internet we know today.

FogCam will be shut down at the end of the month after 25 years. The camera was set up in 1994 by Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong while they were students at San Francisco State University as a way to show what life was like on the campus. The camera uploaded a grainy image of Holloway Avenue every 20 seconds to the FogCam website, though it moved through different locations on the campus throughout its lifespan to prevent being shut down by the university, who Schwartz said “tolerated” but didn’t actually “endorse” the camera. Of course, nowadays, we have webcams capable of streaming 4K footage live (and the connections capable of handling that sort of bandwidth), but at least for me, there’s a lot of nostalgia with devices like this. In 1994, I was just a kid beginning to discover the internet, and the novelty of devices like this that showed the potential of society being so connected is hard to overstate. FogCam’s website will remain up after the camera itself is shut down. 

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