Talks about the first Internet teddy bear.
While CNN was sensationalising as only American Cable TV can, claiming that the North Island was blowing up, the Internet was the place to go for the real story in 1995.
View 1995 › or Start at 1989“I worked at a little TV production house in Dunedin run by a crazy bunch of musicians. We got into the Web around the end of 1995 and because they were into TV production and the Internet, we were observing what was happening on the Web. There was one that had a webcam on a coffee cup and a coffee plunger – not very interesting – so we decided to come up with our own. We had this editor who used to work on Shortland Street as editor and came down to work for us. He’s a technical whiz, a guy called Paul Newell, and he managed to wire together a security camera up to a Macintosh with a Spigot card in it and he wrote this little script which would capture the frames every 30 seconds or something and put up this little gif. It was 240 wired which back then was pretty cool. It was pointed at my desk so I brought my bear in and stuck him in front of the camera in various poses. This became what could be the world’s first bearcam and New Zealand’s first webcam as well. So this ran for about two weeks and people heard about it through the Bulletin Boards and after about three days, we got a call from the ISP complaining about the amount of traffic that was going through. We ended up in the situation where it started costing money so they had to take down what was the outside connection to the world so it could only be seen in New Zealand because of the huge bandwidth involved.”