[HN Gopher] Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC
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Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC
Author : Ivoah
Score : 117 points
Date : 2023-07-25 02:19 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docpop.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (docpop.org)
| taterbase wrote:
| There's a really interesting movie called "We Live in Public"
| that documents one of the early tech pioneers Josh Harris as he
| sells his internet radio company and then creates an underground
| CCTV community. It's fascinating and equally frightening how
| people behaved towards one another while sharing space and
| constantly watching each other. It reminds me a lot the
| relationship many twitch streamers have with their viewers. You
| can find the movie for free on Tubi (in the states at least).
| robbywashere_ wrote:
| Probably got demolished and turned into a bank or a Verizon
| store.
| fallendev wrote:
| This place seemed so cool, it's a shame it's gone now, I would
| love to go to a bar like this.
| naetius wrote:
| *its
| nimajneb wrote:
| This is fascinating, I would definitely frequent a bar with a
| theme like this. It's amazing.
| bozhark wrote:
| This would be really neat today if there were different bars in
| different places all linked together like this.
|
| No ?, just a really neat concept
| fortran77 wrote:
| I know the source article had misspelled "its" and it's policy
| here to keep the original title, but can we change it to:
| Way ahead of [it's] time: The Remote Lounge NYC (docpop.org)
|
| or Way ahead of it's [sic] time: The Remote
| Lounge NYC (docpop.org)
|
| so it doesn't hurt readers' brains so much when they try to parse
| the sentence?
| nhod wrote:
| 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!
| CSMastermind wrote:
| 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?
| nhod wrote:
| 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.
| tetrep wrote:
| Do you have access to the source code / would you be willing to
| share it?
| nateguchi wrote:
| Can you give some details on the hardware? What was the image
| capture device?
| nhod wrote:
| 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.
| nhod wrote:
| 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.
| nhod wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://youtu.be/3i3db-QgHYE
| 20after4 wrote:
| I love Leo's videos. Really top notch YouTube content.
| barcode_feeder wrote:
| Know of any comparably inspired venues in 2023?
| confoundcofound wrote:
| Is there any way back (forward) to this sort of tech innocence?
| rozap wrote:
| I think the general concept has continued to circulate on the
| internet. Chat roullete was popular for a long time,
| https://chat.meatspac.es/ was a great niche for a while,
| omegle, etc, etc. But like Leo said in the video, these sorts
| of "experiments" are really sensitive to a critical mass, where
| they're super fun if you have > N people on the thing at the
| same time, and kinda weird if you have < N.
| sfuller808 wrote:
| [dead]
| macNchz wrote:
| The video by one of the creators (at the very bottom of the page)
| is super interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i3db-QgHYE
|
| I was too young for this when it happened, but it reminds me a
| bit of when randomized video chat sites (Chatroulette and
| others?) first got popular in ~2009. I was a senior in college at
| the time, and we'd have big house parties during which we'd sit a
| webcam on top of a TV in the living room and just let it run,
| connecting to random strangers. Fun and interesting dynamic as
| people milled around the party and had brief interactions with
| people from around the world.
| stevenhubertron wrote:
| I have spent many nights there. I was good friends with the
| bartender and was there at least 1 night a week. Fun time. Have
| lotsa photos of it.
| paulgb wrote:
| Neat! In case anyone else is curious where it was, apparently
| it's the present-day location of the Bowery Electric.
| https://www.theboweryelectric.com/
| foobarbecue wrote:
| There is a misplaced apostrophe in the title.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I'm curious -- why the downvotes? Does someone think I'm
| incorrect?
|
| The title here, to me, reads "Way ahead of it is time: The
| Remote Lounge NYC." I had to think about for a bit before I
| realized what was going on. I just thought someone might want
| to correct it.
|
| Edit: I see it's wrong in the original, so we just keep it, I
| suppose.
| keepper wrote:
| Way to bring a memory back. I remember going to this place.
| Definitely wish there were more places like this now ( in nyc and
| elsewhere )
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Very cool. I wish I could have visited. I miss wacky theme bars
| like this.
|
| One of my favorite theme bars was a place in Mexico City called
| "Bang Bang" (closed down years ago).
|
| It was Stanley Kubrick themed. There were little black and white
| TVs everywhere playing weird stuff. Then in the back was a
| replica 2001: A Space Odyssey bedroom; from the end of the movie.
| With a glowing white floor. Many people would pile into the bed
| to smoke, drink, and make out.
| donretag wrote:
| Not too far from the Remote Lounge was a Clockwork Orange
| themed bar named Korova Milk Bar around the same time.
| MrMan wrote:
| [dead]
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