Its purpose was simple: to provide researchers in the computer lab with an easy way to check whether the coffee pot in the next room over was full or empty. Co-creator Jeff Schwartz, known online as Webdog, was a graduate student at the time, and while learning how to script, he discovered the first-ever live webcam, which actually predated the internet - the Trojan Room Coffee Pot cam at the University of Cambridge. Though it’s revered today as a technology milestone and a pioneer of the World Wide Web, Roderick describes FogCam as a student project that started in the university’s instructional technologies department in the fall of 1994 and just never left. Robyn Ollodort, of SFSU's academic technology department, shows off Fogcam on her iPhone, on Tuesday, Sept. ![]() Twenty seconds later, the image disappears forever.Ī few years ago, FogCam itself almost met a similar fate. The only thing missing is the camera’s namesake fog. I squint my eyes, but sure enough, there we are - a cluster of tiny silhouettes under a light pole on the tree-lined sidewalk. Live San Francisco views since 1994.” Beneath it is a grainy photograph that reminds me of a home video recorded on a VHS tape a surreal, bird’s-eye view of where we’re standing, just to the right of the Cesar Chavez Student Center. “The San Francisco FogCam!” it reads in red italicized letters. His colleague, communications coordinator Robyn Ollodort, excitedly rummages through her pocket to pull out her iPhone, then shows me the screen displaying a website that hasn’t changed much since it was launched nearly three decades ago. “There it is,” the associate vice president of the university’s academic technology department says.
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