Uniontown Pennsylvania Message Forums - WWW.UNIONTOWN.COM

Stumbled across an image from a long time ago, it has a story behind it that I thought would be fun to share.

Back in 1995 and 1996, the Internet was in it's infancy. I helped a friend set up an ISP in Washington, and then me and a friend partnered with him by starting up a Uniontown branch. In my residence I had a T1 line installed and had 10 analog telephone lines with 10 modems. I had just over 100 users (a 10:1 ratio), some of which were Commodore 64 users (NOT KIDDING, I had my terminal server pipe them straight in to a Unix prompt for command line text browsing!)

Also during this period, I built an Internet camera that would take continual live snapshots every 30 seconds and save them on my web server where the world could view them. This camera originally floated around Uniontown, anywhere I could get a dialup line to dedicate to it. At one point, I had it installed in a Uniontown bar for the WDVE morning show when they visited Uniontown, had a lot of hits that day because they announced me on the air.

Back in those days, there was no such thing as a webcam in the modern conventional sense. I had a VHS Camcorder piping analog video into an expensive video capture board in a PC, and I had to custom write software that would pull snapshots from the card and immediately FTP it to the server where the web page called the image over and over. This had to all be done over a Trumpet Winsock TCP/IP stack and a Dialup modem (Windows back then didn't have TCP/IP built in).

The last public place I had the Camera installed was at Mt. Vernon Inn in the large window overlooking 5 corners, and thought I would share one of the last images that webcam captured. Here's the picture.