For about 4 years of my life (including a span of about 2.5 years solid) I lived with webcams watching almost my every move while I was in my dorm room. After a few million pictures taken of us, a couple million visitors, and tens of thousands of chat messages sent back and forth, I decided to call it quits. Here's a bit of history of it, at least.
UPDATE (02/20/2002): Check out the new cam image gallery.
The webcam went through a number of name changes whenever it moved, though there was a theme:
[95/96] Absolutely Amazing Dan and Dave Cam[96/97] Absolutely Amazing Attic Cam[Sum97] Absolutely Amazing Skinner Summer Cam[97/98] Absolutely Amazing Blumberg Cam[Sum98] Absolutely Amazing Skinner Summer Cam[98/99] Absolutely Amazing Blumberg CamThe "Absolutely Amazing" part was tacky, but we noticed a remarkable increase in hits when we changed the name from just the "Dan and Dave Cam" to the "Absolutely Amazing..." on Yahoo's listings, just because it put us in the top 3 alphabetically.
Of course, I wasn't the only one visitors were likely to see. Anyone who lived in the dorm or suite was fair game. This is essentially the list of everyone I lived with while living on a campus from 1996 on.
When I first started putzing around on the Internet back in 1994, one of the neat things I found were a few pages that had regularly updated images of various places all around the world. Most of the subjects weren't that interesting, but the novelty of being able to see the uninteresting subjects was.
Sometime in '95, a friend of mine (Brian Beaty) got a hold of a camera and along with Justin modified some software for Linux so it could be used to just spit out the image to a file and his webcam was born.
A bit after that, I went to visit Rose-Hulman for a couple days and during that time Justin and I further modified the software so it was a bit faster and just spit the image out to the web browser directly.
For Christmas of 1995 I got a Connectix black and white QuickCam and the Dan and Dave Cam was born. After getting it working on the Academy's Internet server (which was in my dorm room), I added a dumb terminal which beeped and printed out information whenever someone took another picture of us. Soon after that I even made it so that visitors could send us messages which appeared on the same screen, making the cam fairly interactive (when we were feeling interactive).
Even though it was only operating for a few months, we had several hundred thousand pictures taken of us. We even met some people that we kept in touch with during this time, including Frank Perkins who we are proud to have inspired to setup his own webcam.
During my first year at Rose, I (and the cam) lived in an attic room (311) in Deming Hall along with Chris Prince, Justin Morey, and Brian Beaty. This is when the cam became one of the first to have an interactive chat with the people 'on camera' as well as those visiting the site, and the first to use the particular layout (at least it was the only one on the Yahoo list or any other I could find like it). It looked very similar to the layout currently used by Frank Perkins.
I worked for the computing center at Rose-Hulman for the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years, and lived way across campus in a Skinner suite (B2B). I roomed with Chris Prince; Friso Schlottau, and Mike Van Vertloo were in another room, and the infamous Rahul Iyer lived (surprise surprise) alone in the third room until joined halfway though by Surat Intasang. There were a number of unfortunate incidents that year involving Rahul and the webcam which seem to get brought up way too often.
For my Sophomore year I lived with Justin Morey in Blumberg Hall (room 209) which was as far across campus from Skinner as you can get. Honestly, not a lot happened that year.
Mostly out of loyalty to WCC (which was not exactly returned to me by my employer), I stayed on an almost unprecidented second summer since otherwise all the student managers would have been rookies. That time I roomed with Justin in C2A, though he was only there for a couple weeks out of the summer. That summer wasn't quite as interesting as the one before for webcam visitors, but they got to see a lot of stuff I wish they hadn't ;) At the very end of the summer the server that ran the webcam started to have some problems, which I didn't get around to fixing for a while.
Justin and I moved back into Blumberg 209 again for my junior (his senior) year. The cam was only up for a couple months during this year, but they were an entertaining couple months at least. The reasons it wasn't up all that long had to do mainly with some things that happened during the summer (there was someone I was trying to avoid, frankly), but also by that time I had grown somewhat tired of it, and I was spending a lot of time just chatting with people.
I might as well give a bit of information about the technical aspects of the site. We had two Connectix QuickCams, one b/w and one color QC2 (which was donated during the Attic Cam days). The Dan and Dave cam ran on a P5/100, the Attic Cam started off using a 386/40 with 8MB RAM, but then someone donated an AMD 5x86/133 with 32MB. While we didn't have streaming video, whenever the visitors would reload the page it would take another picture so it was essentially "live" (most cams just took pictures every 5 minutes). Whenever someone took a picture, it let us know the IP/hostname of the person who just took a picture so we could tell who was seeing what. Back in the Dan and Dave Cam days, it even beeped whenever someone took a picture. Initially the conversation was essentially one-way; the visitors could send us messages through the web page but there was no automated way to do the reverse. Starting with the Attic Cam we has two-way and inter-visitor chat which made it easier for us to response and more interesting for the visitors. Everything stayed roughly the same until Blumberg Cam II, at which point I rewrote the chat to use MySQL (before Frank Perkins did -- ha ha). Frank and I had duelling chat improvements for a while even.
There are still links to this site! Here are a couple:
I don't recall the details, but some artist in Europe had an installation sometime in 96 or 97 in which images were projected onto walls of a museum somewhere, and our cam fed into that.
We were mentioned in a few print news stories. I used to have the newspapers, but I have a bad feeling I threw them away in a recent move because I forgot why I had them. There's also this minor mention that's still online: Web-cam sites offer odd sights
Sometime in 1995, we were contacted by a representative of NeXT who wanted us to become a demo site for WebObjects. Unfortunately, our contact was let go around the time of the Apple merger, and so we never did complete that project. We got a few hundred bucks of free software out of it, though.