Administrators of what is billed as the world’s oldest webcam have announced that the live stream from the camera will be shut off for good on August 30, reports the SFGate. That camera, known as the “FogCam,” was originally installed on the campus of San Francisco State University, facing Holloway Avenue, in 1994. Its purpose was to allow anyone to see how the weather changed over the campus. And besides the occasional need for maintenance, the FogCam has run almost uninterrupted since then.
We felt it was time to let it go. The bottom line is that we no longer have a really good view or place to put the camera. The university tolerates us, but they don’t really endorse us and so we have to find secure locations on our own.
Schwartz says he and Wong originally got the idea for FogCam after learning about the very first live webcam that predated the internet: the Trojan Room Coffee Pot cam at the University of Cambridge, which went live in 1993 and was shut off in 2001.
Though the FogCam’s feed will be shut down on August 30, Schwartz says the website that hosted the feed will remain up for posterity. “It was just a little pet project that developed a life of its own. People liked it, so we kept it going,” he told SFGate. “Our webcam is a throwback to the early days of the internet when anyone could do anything.”
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