I actually was the sole developer who wrote all the software that “networked” the custom hardware together. This project was so ahead of its time and yet required some rather arcane programming knowledge. So much fun though. AMA!
How did they find you an pitch the project to you?
You mentioned that the project required some rather arcane programming knowledge. Could you elaborate on this? What areas of programming did you have to delve into that might be considered out of the ordinary?
Was there any discussion about privacy when you were implementing it?
Were there any features or functionalities that you wanted to implement but couldn't due to technical limitations at the time?
How they found me: When I was 18, I was hired by The Disinformation Company (disinfo.com, the subculture search engine, which presaged our now post-truth conspiracy-theory laden world, though now sadly a shadow of its former self) as their Director of Technology. (I was precocious.)
Disinfo had a cozy relationship with Razorfish, perhaps the biggest of the new breed of digital transformation consulting companies that emerged in the 90's. Razorfish was pretty insane back then — wildly smart and creative people working at the absolute forefront of technology, much of which now seems quaint and taken for granted.
As Razorfish rose and went public, it acquired a bunch of companies, one of which was Disinfo. I ended up becoming Director of Technology for RSUB, Razorfish's media division. Razorfish also acquired another company called Electrokinetics, which was all about hardware, and with whom we shared an office. I started hanging around the hardware guys, because, well, I loved hardware, and they were doing neat things like letting you SMS a soda machine to get a Coke. (This is 1999 — this was the stuff of technology demos of the future, not the real world).
When the Dotcom boom turned into the bust, one of the founders of Electrokinetics left to start Remote. I stayed in touch with them, heard about the project, started talking to them about it, one thing led to another, and I started working there!
Arcane knowledge: I was 21 at the time and had dropped out of computer science to work at a startup, so some of this was just being green, but some of it was also an utter lack of documentation. I was using Perl to write this server, because at the time everything was Perl. I had to read, write, and route data to over a hundred serial devices (our Cocktail Consoles) in a non-blocking fashion using DigiKey serial-to-IP converters. In effect, I was writing the basics of a networking stack (read packet, figure out where it was supposed to be sent, transform it if necessary, send it somewhere else) just over serial.
It wasn't really rocket science, it was just completely undocumented. And also solved by, well, IP networking. But we had to use serial, I was left with basically no books, terrible man pages, and random mentions of stuff in Usenet posts. Much of Linux's serial/tty subsystem was written very early on in the development of the kernel, made rock-solid, and promptly forgotten. What little documentation I could find was sparse and in relation to C functions or syscalls. Perl would then have a wrapper around it, and the wrapper wasn't well-documented nor was it exactly like the underlying call, so there was just a lot of trial and error as I figured out how to properly get the server to wait in a non-blocking way to get input from all of the different serial lines, figure out what to do with them, and write back to them, all in realtime.
Privacy: there was discussion, actually. We had a huge sign when you entered the bar that said something like, "There are hundreds of cameras in here and you agree that you have no expectation of privacy by entering." The whole point was to be a little voyeuristic, so it was very consciously not a private place.
Technical wishes: This is great question, I had to think about it for a bit. Amazingly, I don't think we had a lot of things we weren't able to do. We were able to take screen grabs and email them to people, so taking that a step further I suppose it would have been nice to be able to capture entire video streams instead of just still images, but the whole place had this Jetsons retro-future vibe to it, so some of the limitations were in line with the ethos of the place.
I love this response. How it gives so much insight into an area of someone's past life dealing with interesting topics, giving one a glimpse of what it was like back then and there.
Good post, I remember those days well and this exposure we had to all that tech absolutely had its influences for many of us.
The real-world demo of that sms-soda machine was at the Stockholm offices, and one of several why I eventually moved out this way and have stayed.
Though razorfish stuff is pretty spot on except I'm pretty sure Razorfish didnt BUY disinfo, but funded and supported it, IIRC Gary and Richard retained ownership, that was a content play for RSUB, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Razorfish.
...and coincidentally Gary is selling all the brand and contents right now.
ckn (Former IT Director @razorfish 1996-1999, Current Security Champion for R&D @Ericsson)
The founders of Remote (Leo Fernekes and two other partners, Kevin Centanni and Bob Stratton) were some of the funding, and they partnered with a local family who owned and ran a bunch of (very successful) dive bars in the East Village. There may have been other funding too but I think that was the majority of it.
I'm curious if you think web2.0 expanded so rapidly that the novelty of interacting with strangers over a camera was no longer foreign to people (though it seems ChatRoulette didn't even launch until after the shuttering of the Remote Lounge), or if it was just the kind of gimmicky thing that had an expiration date regardless of how the world around us changed during that time period
Oh, the video capture device: because we had everything on analog CCTV, I had two analog TV tuner video capture cards in the server. Plain old 640x480 black and white analog video. When someone pressed the screen capture button on a Cocktail Console, I changed the channel on the video capture card to the appropriate channel, did a screen grab, and dumped the file in a folder on the server. People pressed it infrequently enough that two cards were fine to handle all the volume.
Every day I'd create a new mm-dd-yyyy folder for images to go to, and the Remote web site had a calendar on it. You could go to the site, click on the night you were there, see all the images captured by all people that night, and save your images if you felt like it.
Yep! First, here’s a video from the guy who developed all the hardware, Leo Fernekes. (He runs a great YouTube channel called Leo’s Bag of Tricks all about electronics and neat stuff you can do. Leo’s a genius.) Lots of details in here.
The Cocktail Consoles (as we called them) were all custom hardware. Everything was designed to be rock-solid both physically (bars are full of drunk people and liquids) and operationally (everything had to Just Work). Leo designed a core “motherboard” which was a PIC microcontroller (I forget the exact model) that did five main things: serial I/O for the buttons and joystick; serial I/O for the attached TV tuner; serial I/O for the attached pan-tilt video camera; audio from the telephone handset; and then multiplexing all of that serial I/O and sending it over serial to a central server (which I wrote — in Perl!) which then controlled all the Cocktail Consoles in the bar.
We used black and white cameras because they were both cheaper and also had much better sensitivity to low-light conditions (this has changed somewhat — but not entirely — in 20+ years) and black and white tube TVs because they were cheap. (This part was actually really dangerous — tube TVs hold enormous charges after they’ve been switched off, enough to kill someone, and we had the guts exposed on the insides of the Cocktail Consoles. Had to be very careful). We used public telephone handsets for the audio because of their durability, and video game buttons and joysticks so you could try very hard, and generally fail, to damage them.
The TV's, cameras, and telephone audio were all connected over an analog CCTV system. The camera was video source and the handset's microphone was the audio source for a given channel. The TV could be tuned to any channel, and was thus the video output device, and the handset's speaker was tied to the same channel. Thus, if you tuned to any camera, you would see and hear whatever was going on at that console, but not the other way around, so it was rather voyeuristic. If TV A was tuned to camera B, and TV B was tuned to camera A, that established a bi-directional link, which meant you could see and converse with the other person.
The serial data from all the microcontrollers were sent over serial-to-CAT5 converters, so the entire place was wired for Ethernet, but it was plain old serial over the wire. We then had these serial cards in a Dell server on the other end, which presented as roughly 100 serial ports on the server.
This was where I had to do a lot of learning. I was a good IP programmer, but I had to reach back into the depths of the kernel and learn all about TTYs and switch() and lots of other stuff that even in 2000 was sort of forgotten. It took me forever to find any good documentation on how to handle that many serial ports in a non-blocking way.
I kept asking Leo to just put a cheap Intel box in each machine and do it all over regular Ethernet, but he (rightly) kept insisting on this low-cost, rock-solid approach. Today the calculus would undoubtedly be different — you would do everything over IP — but back then Leo had a level of foresight I still admire.
Yep. 3rd and Bowery, before CBGB closed and the East Village went from the bohemian hipster world of RENT to the expensive place it is today. The Bowery had just barely changed from “don’t go there ever” to “oh, cool!”
Thanks so much for joining this conversation, I’m a big fan of your work! Years before I joined any social network, the Remote Lounge already had me thinking about online sharing, consent, and the future of the web.
I’d really like To know how your experience working on The Remote Lounge affected the way you viewed the rise of Web 2.0 and the way we share our lives online.
This is a good question. Remote (and its ancestor We Live in Public) was way ahead of its time in regards to how public people were going to be about sharing their lives online. In many ways Remote was merely an instance of much larger trends in society that began decades (centuries?) before. Sharing your life with people you have never met; the culture (and cult) of celebrity; the long tail; constructing a persona for the public vs your private life; taking pictures of people without permission or knowledge; meeting people in the same room as you not via talking directly to them but through a technological disintermediation; technology as art... Remote had all of these things and more, all incorporated using the available technology at the time. (The medium is the message!)
Those same trends continued on as technology improved: as hundreds of cameras in a single venue became billions of cameras all around us and in every pocket; as capturing a grainy black and white photo on a single debaucherous night and sharing it via email became sharing high resolution 4k sex videos on Grindr and Tinder; as dressing up infrequently for a single night so as to take advantage of the video and photo technology in an unusual venue became constant "dressing up" via creating an entire persona you constantly curate on various social media platforms; as small-time surveillance you willingly went into for fun became ubiquitous surveillance that made trillions of dollars for new hegemonies and entrenched the other powers that be even further; as the "innocent" early internet culture we started with that was all about freedom and revolution and individual power turned ugly and scary following 9/11 and became walled gardens and centralized control. (As another commenter pointed out, Remote opened shortly after 9/11 — we were supposed to open around 9/13, but then the world ended, and we had to push it back a bit.)
Anyway not sure I answered your question fully but hopefully got in the right neighborhood!
Thanks so much for your replies. I'm updating my blog (which is linked at the top of this HN post) with the information I'm learning here. How would you like your name credited there? I have you listed as "nhod" for now. https://docpop.org/2023/07/some-updates-on-the-remote-lounge...
Not exactly the same thing, but they had a phone version of this at MeowWolf, the huge interactive trippy art exhibit, in Denver. They had phone terminals laying around with a whole directory of fake businesses. At first, I thought they staffed the lines with employees, but it turned out to be a system like this minus the video screens.
