| this was actually a pretty serious nostalgic moment as it happened to also be the same model as my first webcam ...and that "eyeball on a stand" form-factor also became the de-facto one for a webcam (just image search "webcam icon"), so it is also historically significant from that perspective. This is almost like the inverse of some efforts in the retrocomputing community, which involve writing drivers to allow new hardware to work with old OSs, among them Windows XP and the 9x series. But I think the most frustrating reason to have to get rid of something is that drivers stop being made for devices. ...and they have a similar mindset: if there are no drivers, then let's write some. On the topic of this particular camera, a little bit of searching shows some more information from a 23-year-old page: http://www.geocities.ws/qcexpress/quickcam.html ...through which we get a hint that you can download the datasheet for the PB-0100 sensor from Photobit's site; although it is long gone, archive.org has saved some pieces: https://web.archive.org/web/20001018065459/http://www.photob... Sadly, the datasheets themselves weren't saved. I could find some for their later, larger sensors, but unfortunately not this one (although it may be out there, the increasing uselessness of search engines is a huge impediment --- and I do think that such destruction of access to historical information may in fact be deliberate.) |