The thing in the circular was a Dynex DX-WC1. The price, $39.99, was the first thing my father noticed. He picked up the grainy, black-and-white newspaper photo. "Looks like a tiny robot frog."
At home, I was tasked with the installation. The "plug-and-play" promise was a lie. The Dell was running Windows XP, and after plugging in the thin, grey USB cable, the "Found New Hardware Wizard" popped up, helpless. I had to dig the included mini-CD from the box—a disc so flimsy it wobbled in the drive tray. The driver software was a time capsule: a window with a brushed-metal background, a "Dynex" logo in a forgettable sans-serif font, and a single button that said "Install." dynex pc camera
For the next two years, the Dynex became the family hearth. Every Sunday at 7 PM, my mother would clip the little black frog onto the top of the Dell’s monitor, angle it down at her face, and press "Call." The camera saw everything: my father’s jokes about the weather, my own surly teenage silences, the family cat jumping onto the keyboard. It saw my mother’s worried frown lines and the way she’d mouth "I love you" after hanging up. The thing in the circular was a Dynex DX-WC1
The distance was only 120 miles, but to my mother, it might as well have been the far side of the moon. The nightly phone calls were expensive, the e-mails too cold. "I need to see her," my mother declared one Tuesday evening, brandishing a Sunday circular from Best Buy. "They have these… camera things." "Looks like a tiny robot frog
On the back of the box, the promises were printed in seven languages: 640 x 480 resolution. Plug-and-play USB 2.0. Built-in microphone. Snap photos. Record video. The sample images were pixelated and overexposed, but to my father, it was magic.