What just happened? The world's oldest continuously operating webcam is shutting down at the end of the month after roughly 25 years of operation. Nobody is really upset that an ancient webcam is shutting down but rather, some are sad to see another piece of history fade away.

The FogCam was set up by Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong while students at San Francisco State University in 1994. In an interview with SFGate, Schwartz said his inspiration for FogCam stemmed while learning to script... and from the first-ever live webcam.

The Trojan Room coffee pot cam at the University of Cambridge got its start in 1991 as a way for researchers at the school to see if there was any coffee left in the pot before unnecessarily making the trek to the kitchen. The camera went live on the Internet in 1993 and eventually gained international notoriety before being retired in 2001.

"Our webcam is a throwback to the early days of the Internet when anyone could do anything," Schwartz told the publication.

Indeed, the tech community has lost several historic relics in recent memory including Blockbuster, Winamp and AOL Instant Messenger and most recently, MSDN Magazine.

"We felt it was time to let it go," Schwartz said. That, and the university no longer really endorses the project. "The bottom line is that we no longer have a really good view or place to put the camera."

Masthead credit: Golden Gate bridge by Francesco Carucci