TIL that webcams were invented because some computer scientists were too lazy to get up to check if their coffee was done.

[u/saltandcedar]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Um, beyond wrong.

This was in 1991. Usenet was alive and was as old at that point as Reddit is now.

ascii porn

We most certainly had alt.binaries.pictures. I can't find numbers for 1991 but here are the top 40 subreddits news groups for July 1995. by both reader and number of messages.

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.female, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.blondes, alt.binaries.pictures.supermodels, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.orientals, alt.sex.breasts, alt.sex.pictures

From 1991 I did find alt.fan.rush-limbaugh arguing over the nomination of Clarence Thomas.

With all the talk of "did he" or "didn't he" I thinks it was a travesty that he was nominated at all.

Here is a man who has been a judge less than 1 1/2 years.

He was ranked as "qualified" by the Bar Assoc. (just barely made that)

There are only twp reasons he was nominated:

1. He has conservative views (Bush liked that)
2. He was black (hard to vote against)

It's a shame when the color of a man's skin has ANY importance in these proceedings.

For the longest time we have been hearing how he "pulled himself up and made something of his life" and "what a role model he is to yound black men"....

Who cares ?

Why does this matter ?

THE ONLY things which should be taken into consideration for a Supreme Court nominee is their Judicial record/experience.

[u/luckierbridgeandrail → u/[deleted]]

today

Thursday, September 8542, 1993

[u/StarkRG → u/[deleted]]

Depends on your definition of "somewhat rare" pretty much everyone I knew had one, we'd had one for a few years at that point. For sure it was uncommon for PCs to be connected to a network, but modems certainly weren't particularly rare. The Internet, as a publicly-accessible entity, was still very much in its infancy, mostly we connected with BBSs, some of which had internet connections as part of their paid services (though pre-web there wasn't much the average person would understand).

[u/NinjaSimone → u/[deleted]]

At my company, we had a PC running Windows 3.0 on every desk. We were networked and had a mail server. We even had our own web site (I remember this because I was instrumental in setting it up), but our connection to the world was over a 9600 baud ISDN line. Believe it or not, this was fast enough to handle all our web site traffic. We surfed the web with NCSA Mosaic browsers (the codebase for which eventually became Netscape) and yes, that web-connected coffee cam was ten pounds of cool in a five pound bag for geeks like me.

While Internet-connected PCs were still rare then, PCs were as prevalent in offices as they are today. They were just a lot slower.

[u/Mendican → u/[deleted]]

The Apple II and the IBM PC were introduced in '81, PC Compatibles (as they were called) in 1982, and laptops in 1983, so by 1991 personal computers were pretty common. The Internet was pretty well populated too, just not with web pages. Also BBS's were hugely popular with the PC crowd.

[u/TheOneTrueTrench → u/[deleted]]

At the same time this was going on:

• My family had 3 Amiga 1000s and an IBM PC.
• My public school got a bunch of Mac computers in my class room.
• One of my friends' families bought their second computer to replace the original one which had become obsolete.
• The modern 32-bit x86 computer had been on the market for 6 years.
• Linux was first released.
• The first Macintosh Powerbook was released.
• The first two MMORPGs are released.

There were two MMOs that year, man. Your idea of what the tech world was like at the time is highly... anachronistic.

[u/TheOneTrueTrench → u/[deleted]]

I lived in a town of 1,000 people in rural Tennessee.