early adopters, hype, and history (with pretty pictures)

I am an early adopter, which can make for some less than enthusiastic reactions from me once everyone catches up.  The main point of this posting is just to say that it seems to me we forget our history so quickly - it's like the new overwrites the old, with no memory of the past.  I think a lot of this could be addressed by people adding just a single history slide to their presentations, just to say "yes, Skype and Flickr are fun, but by the way, there's 15+ years of Internet history behind the latest buzz".

In theory I should be able to go back to my digital photo #0001, but in practice the earliest I could find was #0019, from June 14, 2000.

I was trying to figure out some of the Flickr excitement, and then a speaker's comment twigged me, he said something along the lines of "the people at Flickr came up with an amazing idea... share digital photos".  Then I realized: to late adopters, whatever is mainstream looks innovative.  In fact they may think that whoever is the latest service provider invented providing that service.

My first online photo gallery is in Ofoto.  July 10, 2000.
Yes, it's still there, stored by the fine folks at Kodak.
The earliest public photo gallery I have up, also in Ofoto, is Halifax Public Gardens and Area, August 2001.

I've also had a digital video (DV) camcorder since 1999, so you will find me less than amazed with this year's wave of Internet video excitement.

All of this sort of stuff on the net - photos, audio, video - it was all out there already 5-10 years ago.  I realize that a lot of it is only hitting major public adoption now, but the main point is to keep Internet history in mind.  It always seems to me that in the excitement of Web 2.0 or whatever the latest net.bubble is, we forget that there may be lots of history to something that appears "new". 

If you want some of the history of video and audio conferencing, you could start with CU-SeeMe, which I used in the 1990s.

CU-SeeMe is an internet video-conferencing client written by students at Cornell University. It was first developed for the Macintosh in 1992 and later for the Windows platform in 1994. Originally it was video-only with audio added in 1994 for the Macintosh and 1995 for Windows. CU-SeeMe's audio came from Maven, an audio only client developed at the University of Illinois.

So the exciting new world of Internet video is now at least 14 years old.  The Mac, with a microphone and a QuickCam, was actually a big part of that.

Here's a movie I did with the QuickCam and synchronized CD audio.  According to my file system, it's from July 26, 1998:  QuickCam.mov (requires QuickTime)

The earliest QuickCam digital photo I could err... quickly find on my system is from April 2, 1996.
(It's me sweeping one of those glow-in-the-dark sticks in front of my face.)

Maybe someone should do a vlog about Internet video history.

Comments

[Paul]

Great post Richard, and well put with the late adopters quote. I was listening to a podcast the other day in which someone called in with some feedback using Skype. For the first time. He'd just heard about it. At that point I realized how fortunate I am to be in a business where I'm *supposed* to keep current with stuff like this! I remember CU-SeeMe, but I've moved far too many times to have any arvhives like the one you describe. Does remind me though of the working installed copy of Mosaic I found on one of my old machines in 1999, long after we'd moved on to Netscape 4.x :-)

[Marc]

nice post, i set up a cuseeme page and a free reflector feel free to join or test

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