Tag: webcam

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Ancient Web: Komar.org Let the Internet Control 25,000 Christmas Lights

For more than a decade, random people on the Internet could visit a house in Colorado and start turning its Christmas decorations on and off.

Visit Komar.org

Alek Komarnitsky’s personal website is already a classic old-web junk drawer: travel stories, wildlife cameras, home projects, photography tests, sysadmin material, family pages, solar panels, BBQ experiments, and enough links to make a modern UX consultant quietly leave the room.

Then there were the Christmas lights.

Twenty-five thousand lights and a web control panel

The archived 2014 Christmas page describes three live webcams and more than 20,000 controllable lights. Visitors could switch zones on and off and inflate or deflate decorations including Elmo, Frosty, Santa, and Homer Simpson.

The electrical table gets even better.

Komarnitsky documented 22 circuits, 76.2 amps, and a total of 25,000 lights. He calculated the full display at roughly 9.1 kilowatts and estimated the operating cost based on Colorado electricity prices. The page also logged setup dates, snow, equipment, webcam changes, and the final shutdown of the display.

This was not an Internet-of-Things startup.

It was a guy wiring his house into the web because that sounded funny.

The project also pointed visitors toward celiac-disease research rather than asking them to pay for the spectacle. The page says Komarnitsky ended the long-running controllable display after the 2014 season and later sold the equipment.

What survives is a perfect artifact of an era when a personal website could become temporarily famous because someone built a ridiculous technical thing and exposed the controls to strangers.

Komar.org itself is still active, with material extending from the late 1990s into 2026. That continuity makes the old Christmas project even better: it remains embedded inside the same personal homepage ecosystem that produced it.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of sites where the web was treated as a workshop rather than a publishing platform.

Komar.org is what happens when the workshop reaches the breaker panel.

Return to Komar.org

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Ancient Web: FishCam Has Been Pointing a Camera at Something Since 1994

A webcam is boring now. In 1994, pointing a camera at a fish tank and putting the picture on the web was enough to make history.

Visit the Amazing FishCam

FishCam says it began that year inside Netscape, when a camera was trained on a lonely aquarium and began transmitting images onto the still-new World Wide Web.

The site describes itself as the second live camera on the web and the oldest camera site still in existence.

That claim is part of the site’s own history page, and the larger story fits the moment: early webcams were not polished streaming products. They were experiments in proving that a browser could show something happening somewhere else right now.

The point was that it was live

FishCam’s subject hardly mattered.

The technical and cultural trick was the connection between an ordinary physical object and a remote browser window. A tank full of fish became evidence that the web could carry more than documents.

That sounds obvious after decades of livestreams, doorbell cameras, video calls, wildlife feeds, and phones broadcasting from anywhere. In 1994, it was not obvious at all.

The current site still preserves that tiny premise. There is a main page, an information page, a news section, and the camera image itself. At the moment, the site notes that the fish tank is transitioning to a new location, so the camera has been pointed outside instead.

Which is perfect, really.

The camera remains the artifact even when the fish temporarily do not.

The page also warns visitors that a dark or black-and-white image probably means the lights are off and the infrared mode has taken over. That mundane note is exactly what gives old live-camera sites their charm. Nobody is pretending the feed is entertainment television. You might visit and see basically nothing.

But it is happening now.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes surviving early-web experiments because they preserve the moment when familiar Internet behaviors were still weird enough to build a whole page around.

FishCam’s idea eventually became ordinary.

That is why the surviving original is interesting.

Return to the Amazing FishCam

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Ancient Web: The Coffee Pot That Became a Webcam

Long before webcams became background furniture, a group at the University of Cambridge pointed a camera at a coffee pot because walking down the hall to find an empty pot was apparently too much wasted effort.

Visit the Trojan Room Coffee Machine page

The page that survives is wonderfully matter-of-fact about the whole thing. A video capture board in an Acorn Archimedes grabbed one frame every second. The machine JPEG-encoded the image, and the Web server requested frames through an RPC mechanism developed in the Computer Laboratory.

The coffee pot itself was already being watched before Cambridge had a World Wide Web server. Once the Web arrived, the local convenience hack became something much larger: people outside the building could check the status of a coffee machine they could not possibly drink from.

That is early Web culture in miniature.

A useful problem came first

Nobody started with a marketing plan for “live streaming.” There was coffee in another room. People wanted to know whether there was any left. A camera and network connection solved it.

The surviving page still explains the technical plumbing instead of polishing the story into legend. It mentions MSRPC2, MSNL, the Acorn Archimedes, JPEG encoding, and even the fact that the lights in the Trojan Room were not always switched on.

In November 1994, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire visited to report on the service. The lab did what a lab full of networked computers in 1994 would naturally do: connected a radio to a workstation, relayed the broadcast across the local network, recorded it digitally, and put that online too.

For a webmaster in 2026, the page is a nice reminder that memorable Web projects often begin with an extremely specific problem. The technology serves the thing. The thing does not exist merely to justify a technology stack.

This site came from the larger corpus we are working through for CacheRat’s Ancient Web project. The full list contains 1,967 old, technical, personal, institutional, and generally strange corners of the Web.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

The original coffee machine is no longer dispensing status reports to the Internet, but Cambridge kept the page and the explanation.

See the Trojan Room Coffee Machine page