Webcams
There was a very brief period of time in the late 90s early 00s when the word “webcam” had just started existing and entering the popular discourse; and where that word was practically synonymous with “sex show”.
I think around the time I first heard that word, having a webcam usually meant you would use it to do nude shows with.
They weren’t integrated with computers back then (laptops were super expensive and not popular yet, and they weren’t a mainstream laptop accessory until way later). So if you had a webcam, you had to really seek it out and pay quite a bit of money for it. It made little sense for people to buy them just to use them for personal reasons and most jobs didn’t have a utility for them.
… except sex work. Live, paid access cam shows immediately caught on. And people would see those in ads (ads tended to be trashy with zero quality control back then, even automated. Worse than now, I swear), and associate “webcam” with “webcam show”.
There was no reason to otherwise hook up a camera to a computer if not to stream its contents to the web, anyway. The first webcam, that famous coffee pot, was just that: a web-connected camera. Web cam. Wikipedia talks about “Jenni cam” — I wasn’t on the anglosphere’s internet at the time so this escaped me, but it does seem to agree that the concept entered the mainstream not via videoconferencing, but via cam girls.
Yep! I have my grandfather's laptop from 1996 and it has a webcam. It even (mostly) works, or did the last time I booted it up!
Ah what a great reply :)
I don’t know how clear I made it in my post but the time where this was synonymous was brief. A year, maybe less. It’s also possible that the order of things went differently in North America than here in Europe. But what you are citing doesn’t sound like how most people would have heard of the word during that time.
Keep in mind that, although on average businesses tended to pick up new technology quite quickly, most of them had very few computers if they had any at all. One computer per employee wasn’t a normal thing except in the Silicon Valley.
Anyway, videoconferencing did eventually take off as a popular concept when laptops started integrating webcams and having that as a defining feature. But 95 you say? I’m curious to hear more about that; I’m not saying your case didn’t exist, I’m saying it was rare. And I don’t remember this sort of scenario being more common until at least 2000. Is this just a continental difference?
I'm not sure they were called webcams though? Videoconferencing didn't run in early web browsers. Separate apps, often dedicated hardware.
My post is specifically about the word webcam, though :)
To be far, "Jenni cam" wasn't really a "cam girl" thing. It was more like the Twitch streamers that do 24/7 streams of their life or whatever.
Reply All had an interesting episode on it from their early days https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoja
To emphasize points made previously, I worked service desk and systems admin for a U.S. military base contractor in the mid-90's. Webcams were ubiquitous in conference rooms, and many of the General Staff PCs had peripheral cameras/microphones. Keeping in mind the DARPA backbone bandwidth, the streaming software was adequate and these cameras functioned well enough for routine video calls.
Silicon Graphics sold very expensive workstations that came with a video camera. It had a physical shutter. (This was actually their low-end model.)
Apparently this was the first computer to come with a camera.
At HotWired, we used these machines as web servers. I don’t think we ever used the camera?
That is a very interesting unit but it doesn’t look like it was mainstream at all? (For whatever definition of mainstream you use for the time)
Nope. Silicon Graphics sold expensive machines used by businesses, such as for Hollywood film production or engineering firms using it for CAD. They were big for a while, but then lost business to ordinary PC's with graphics cards.
Google's campus in Mountain View is centered on what used to be Silicon Graphic's headquarters.