Very few people understand the real reason why Kodak failed to dominate the digital world. It actually dates back to a 300 million dollar lawsuit which Honeywell won against Minolta over a patent for an autofocus system. The Japanese camera companies were so outraged over this perceived injustice that they vowed never to engage in technology sharing with American companies ever again and this ended up crippling Kodak's ambitions.
A very similar PetaPixel article with a couple more technical details: [1] In particular, it describes the reason for the first corrupted image – they had wired the four-bit output in the wrong order so that the high bit was the lowest and vice versa. Thus, all-ones still looked white and all-zeros black, but the rest of the shades were scrambled.
Sometimes I think a lot of myself. Sometimes I don't. During the times I do, I console myself about my lack of success by thinking that I have never been in the right place at the right time.
But had I been in that place at that time, I would not have invented the digital camera. That guy Sasson was clearly capable far beyond the rest of us.
He is an exceptional engineer. In 1986 I developed an instant messaging system that worked across the internet on X Windows. It was very popular at HP where I worked. It ran on X Windows and had many of the features of modern messaging systems like WhatsApp. I didn’t think twice about it. A few years later I saw how these apps took the world by storm once the internet became popular. I think I had caught lightning in a bottle but didn’t appreciate it. It’s kind of the opposite of Sasson. However in both cases we were lousy evangelists. Also I’m not an exceptional engineer.
That's a poignant observation. There are "times and places" for things. And whether you or I would have been "the right person" at that time is hard to know.
I consider Wozniak (obvious example) who was at the "right time and place" in the early 1970's. He at the engineering capital of the U.S. (Silicon Valley — already known by that name at the time) knowing adults in engineering fields that could get him otherwise expensive and new for the time microprocessor chips… just as the chips were becoming more affordable—just as Don Lancaster's "TV Typewriter" and the "Altair 8800" began to grace the cover of Popular Electronics…
Woz seemed to flounder, or be overwhelmed somewhat, a decade later when hacks with a 555 Timer chip, a few NAND gates or NTSC timing hijinks to get color was not where the industry was going. He took a back-seat on the engineering side.
At the same time, not to diminish Woz's skills in 1975, there were a lot of other smart kids in the "Valley" then that did have their home-brew computers become a product.
(And then so much more to unpack when you allow for Job's contributions, U.S. schools purchasing Apple computers, etc.)
The Apple's technical quality was head and shoulders above the other PCs of the epoch. It did much more with less hardware than its contemporaries like Altair, IMSAI, Osborne, Kaypro, TRS-80, Heathkit, the PET, the Atari 400, the TI-99/4, Datapoint's products, and the VT100, which contained all the hardware needed for a PC without being programmable. That's a big part of why those other smart kids' companies mostly failed: their products were uncompetitive with things like the Apple and the Commodore 64.
Woz had a serious brain injury in a plane crash in February 01981 (https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/220512), and I think that's when he lost his technical edge. Also, though, he was more interested in flying planes and organizing rock concerts at that point. You could imagine an alternate history where Apple took CPU design in-house in 01981 instead of 02011 or whenever.
Burrell Smith was using PALs in the first Macintosh prototypes in 01979, and the eventual Macintosh was built around the so-called Integrated Burrell Machine (replaced with more expensive but less risky PALs for the final design), which was critical to getting a competitive product out the door. The Apple III that year did have a custom "Integrated Woz Machine", not designed by Woz, and while its hardware design was disastrous, that was in spite of the IWM, not because of it. There was still plenty of opportunity for Woz's specialty of ultra-efficient digital logic design to provide a competitive edge.
It's also interesting to note _why_ Sasson thought that an electronic camera with no moving parts was possible: Star Trek. That was his literal inspiration for the camera that was intended to annoy mechanical engineers by having no mechanical parts.
That's great! I often measure technological progress by how close we are to TNG. Like, there is a new lithotripsy wand that breaks up kidney stones with ultrasound. That feels like something you would see Beverly Crusher use in sick bay.
Side note, the wand was developed to solve for: trip to Mars -> bone density loss -> minerals in blood -> debilitating kidney stone 1 year from a hospital.
Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals.
The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pictures that reveal something essential.
I’m hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits. Apple TV’s “Silo” has a wonderful production design but it’s too claustrophobic to fulfill my wish.
“The Mote in God’s Eye” would be my pick if I could get any IP developed with this approach.
Battlestar Galactica (2004) has an aesthetic like that. While they do use mainframe computers, they avoid all networking due to the risk of being hacked. Galactica is the only Battlestar to survive the first episode specifically because it’s the only one that still uses this outdated technology.
Plus, it’s just one of the best TV shows ever made in any genre.
One of my earliest serious fan sites I made. I forgot the name, might be able to pull it up on archive, but I had a section with the whole cast each with a "cylon suspicion meter" bar. Great memories.
> I'm hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits.
This is what I hoped for Foundation, to replicate the 1940s now-retrofuturism I imagine while reading the books. Alas, it wasn't to be.
I seem to recall a scene from the book where a man is smoking a cigar in an office and prints out his computer output rather than reading from a screen. It was delightfully retrofuturist (or whatever the opposite of anachronistic is).
The “Foundation” we got has good moments and excellent production values, but it doesn’t seem to know or care exactly what the rules of its universe are. (I don’t like how Hari Seldon was apparently a font of semi-magical technology invented all at once and in secret…)
If I recall, in the novel Solaris, set largely on a spaceship orbiting a distant, sentient planet, one of the characters uses a slide rule.
Idea for a sci fi novel: total reliance on chatbots that predict what you want to hear based on the average of the internet ends the astonishing run of innovation we've had since the industrial revolution, and returns us to the situation humanity has been in for most of our history, in which technology develops slowly, if at all. What do things look like in a thousand years, when we're still relying on the current equivalent of slide rules and analog film?
So wild. The wire-wrap boards are truly frightening to look at.
And the photos in the article of the old "instamatic" Kodak film cameras (especially that 110 pocket camera) suddenly brought back to my mind that formaldehyde-like smell of developer chemicals when I worked at a One-Hour-Photo lab when in high school.
The first spy satellites had to literally eject their film back into orbit to be picked up by the CIA and the pictures were then developed in a dark room.
I wonder if any exist on the internet and if the camera is still functional.
Edit: it's very likely that no photos exist because the tapes were being reused and there are many reasons why the camera has been nonfunctional for a long time now.
Yeah, the camera probably hasn't been in functioning condition for decades and people at Kodak likely didn't see much historical value in archiving those tapes.
I don't doubt this description of what happened, but the sad irony in a company whose product was producing tools to generate archival copies of images, not recognising the value of retaining archival copies of images... facepalm.
The popular notion that "Kodak invented the thing that killed them" is basically nonsense.
Steve Sasson's tale of technical struggle in 01975 at Kodak is real, but dozens of other people were doing the same thing at the same time at different companies, or in their dormitories, because at that point the problem of building a handheld digital camera had been reduced to a problem that one guy could solve with off-the-shelf parts. In fact, earlier the same year, a digital camera design was published as a hobbyist project in Popular Electronics, using a 32×32 MOS sensor, and commercialized as the Cromemco Cyclops. (You just had to keep it plugged in; you couldn't take it with you to the Little League game, even though it was small enough to lift in one hand.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Cyclops
The reduction of the problem to such a manageable size was the result of numerous small advances over the previous 50 years.
> It quickly became apparent that the digital image data, acquired by the MSS (Multispectral Scanner) instrument, a whiskbroom scanning device, were of great value for a broad range of applications and scientific investigations. For the first time, the data of an orbiting instrument were available in digital form, quantified at the instrument level - providing a great deal of flexibility by offering all the capabilities of digital processing, storage, and communication.
Landsat 1 was built by General Electric, RCA, NASA, and subcontractors, and the MSS digital camera component in particular was designed by Virginia Norwood at the Hughes Aircraft Company, not at Kodak.
Ranger 7 in 01964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_7 was an electronic camera that was successfully launched into the moon and returned close-range photos of it over radio links, but, as far as I can tell, it wasn't a digital camera; the RF links were analog TV signals.
The first experimental digitization of a signal from an electronic camera was probably done by Frank Gray at Bell Labs, not at Kodak, in 01947, for which he invented the Gray Code. To be able to keep up with live full-motion video data, his analog-to-digital converter was a sort of cathode-ray tube with a shadow mask in it with the code cut into it; this is described in patent 2,632,058, granted in 01953: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a3/d7/f2/0343f5f....
The video camera tubes that were the only way to build electronic cameras up to the 50s, and which made the cameras large and heavy, were supplanted by CCDs like the 100×100 Fairchild MV-101 that Sasson used in his prototype at Kodak. The CCD was developed by Smith and Boyle at Bell Labs, not at Kodak, in 01969–70: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device
However, any DRAM chip is also an image sensor, which is why they are encapsulated in black epoxy to prevent them from sensing light; without the CCD, we would have had CMOS image sensors anyway just because of the light-sensitivity of silicon. In fact, the Cromemco Cyclops used just such a chip.
The fundamental thing that made digital cameras not just possible but inevitable was microelectronics, a technology which owes its existence in 01975 to a long series of innovations including the point-contact transistor (Bardeen and Brattain, 01947, Bell Labs, not at Kodak); the junction transistor (Shockley, 01948, Bell Labs, not at Kodak); the monolithic integrated circuit (Noyce, 01959, Fairchild Semi, not at Kodak); the planar process (Hoerni, 01959, Fairchild Semi, not at Kodak); the MOSFET (Kahng and Atalla, 01959, Bell Labs, not at Kodak); the self-aligned silicon gate (Faggin, 01968, Fairchild Semi, not at Kodak); and, as mentioned in the article, the microprocessor. The microprocessor was overdetermined in the same way as the handheld digital camera, and arose basically simultaneously at RCA, Motorola, TI, and Intel, but whoever we decide invented the microprocessor, it certainly wasn't done at Kodak.
It's interesting that you differentiate between analog and digital electronic cameras.
My first "digital" camera was one of the Canon Ion ones that use floppy discs but actually record the photos in analog, so technically just an "electronic camera", but was marketed as a "Still Video Camera" (!). You had to use a video capture card to get the images into the PC.
This is my first time noticing one of their posts, but to me it evokes the ideals of the Long Now Foundation, putting our thoughts in a future-forward stance.
>"But Joy had followed me back because she was curious, you know, and she was standing in the hallway. We turned around, and Joy says: 'Needs work,' and turned out and walked away."
This part reminded me of the Black Triangle (2004):
Kodak should have ruled the digital imaging space. Instead, they collapsed.
A lot of it was because the film people kneecapped the digital folks.
Film was very profitable.
Until it wasn't.
The company that I worked for, was a classic film company. When digital was first getting a foothold (early 1990s), I used to get lectures about how film would never die...etc.
A few years later, it was as if film never existed. The transition was so sudden, and so complete, that, if you blinked, you missed it.
Years later, I saw the same kind of thing happen to my company, that happened to Kodak.
The iPhone came out, with its embedded camera, and that basically killed the discrete point-and-shoot market, which was very profitable for my company.
When the iPhone first came out, the marketing folks at my company laughed at it.
I worked for a company that was beautifully run with great, smart, hardworking people, led by someone that had been with the technology since the beginning. We almost immediately got acquired by a public company that used different technology that saw us as a threat, and the founders were retained long enough to see their company and workers basically trashed into a mediocre state.
This is a very common story from what I understand, whether the intent is either “if you can’t beat them, buy them!” or even if it’s just to grow.
In Kodak’s case, I wonder if both those that saw it as the future and those that saw it as the end wanted to support and control it.
Also, it never ceases to amaze that some of the best things and the most dangerous things are (1) not those that you planned on and (2) involve someone bending and breaking rules to persue a passion project.
I mean, it was one of those inevitable technologies.
Other companies had already invented the CCD, it was only a matter of time before someone would digitise the signal and pair it with a storage device. It was an obvious concept.
All Kodak really did was develop an obvious concept into a prototype many years before it could be viable, and then receive a patent for it.
That’s not an accurate summary of the article. The problem was that Kodak stuck to the photography business for too long. As the article states, in the early 2000s they were the number one seller of digital cameras. It just turns out making consumer digital cameras was a “crappy business” as their CEO went on to say. Fujifilm diversified into healthcare, cosmetics, and making LCD display films.
What's crazy is that Fujifilm now, once again, makes more money on photographic film than anything else they do, thanks to how popular the Instax instant cameras are.
Very few people understand the real reason why Kodak failed to dominate the digital world. It actually dates back to a 300 million dollar lawsuit which Honeywell won against Minolta over a patent for an autofocus system. The Japanese camera companies were so outraged over this perceived injustice that they vowed never to engage in technology sharing with American companies ever again and this ended up crippling Kodak's ambitions.
> they vowed never to engage in technology sharing with American companies ever again
If this were really the case, I'm surprised the US government didn't engage in antitrust action.
Very US-centric comment. The US can't force entities of an entirely separate country to share technology.
Not directly, but the US can and often does sabotage foreign businesses' operations in the US if they don't comply.
But kodak did do digital cameras. My first one was a Kodak.
A very similar PetaPixel article with a couple more technical details: [1] In particular, it describes the reason for the first corrupted image – they had wired the four-bit output in the wrong order so that the high bit was the lowest and vice versa. Thus, all-ones still looked white and all-zeros black, but the rest of the shades were scrambled.
[1] https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-digital-...
It's a shame they didn't capture that first image. You'd think someone would have had a camera handy!
I was glad to hear Sasson found a place at Eastman-Kodak and worked there for the rest of his career.
Sometimes I think a lot of myself. Sometimes I don't. During the times I do, I console myself about my lack of success by thinking that I have never been in the right place at the right time.
But had I been in that place at that time, I would not have invented the digital camera. That guy Sasson was clearly capable far beyond the rest of us.
He is an exceptional engineer. In 1986 I developed an instant messaging system that worked across the internet on X Windows. It was very popular at HP where I worked. It ran on X Windows and had many of the features of modern messaging systems like WhatsApp. I didn’t think twice about it. A few years later I saw how these apps took the world by storm once the internet became popular. I think I had caught lightning in a bottle but didn’t appreciate it. It’s kind of the opposite of Sasson. However in both cases we were lousy evangelists. Also I’m not an exceptional engineer.
That's a poignant observation. There are "times and places" for things. And whether you or I would have been "the right person" at that time is hard to know.
I consider Wozniak (obvious example) who was at the "right time and place" in the early 1970's. He at the engineering capital of the U.S. (Silicon Valley — already known by that name at the time) knowing adults in engineering fields that could get him otherwise expensive and new for the time microprocessor chips… just as the chips were becoming more affordable—just as Don Lancaster's "TV Typewriter" and the "Altair 8800" began to grace the cover of Popular Electronics…
Woz seemed to flounder, or be overwhelmed somewhat, a decade later when hacks with a 555 Timer chip, a few NAND gates or NTSC timing hijinks to get color was not where the industry was going. He took a back-seat on the engineering side.
At the same time, not to diminish Woz's skills in 1975, there were a lot of other smart kids in the "Valley" then that did have their home-brew computers become a product.
(And then so much more to unpack when you allow for Job's contributions, U.S. schools purchasing Apple computers, etc.)
The Apple's technical quality was head and shoulders above the other PCs of the epoch. It did much more with less hardware than its contemporaries like Altair, IMSAI, Osborne, Kaypro, TRS-80, Heathkit, the PET, the Atari 400, the TI-99/4, Datapoint's products, and the VT100, which contained all the hardware needed for a PC without being programmable. That's a big part of why those other smart kids' companies mostly failed: their products were uncompetitive with things like the Apple and the Commodore 64.
Woz had a serious brain injury in a plane crash in February 01981 (https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/220512), and I think that's when he lost his technical edge. Also, though, he was more interested in flying planes and organizing rock concerts at that point. You could imagine an alternate history where Apple took CPU design in-house in 01981 instead of 02011 or whenever.
Burrell Smith was using PALs in the first Macintosh prototypes in 01979, and the eventual Macintosh was built around the so-called Integrated Burrell Machine (replaced with more expensive but less risky PALs for the final design), which was critical to getting a competitive product out the door. The Apple III that year did have a custom "Integrated Woz Machine", not designed by Woz, and while its hardware design was disastrous, that was in spite of the IWM, not because of it. There was still plenty of opportunity for Woz's specialty of ultra-efficient digital logic design to provide a competitive edge.
I am curious why you write years with a leading zero. Future proofing?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46257598
It's also interesting to note _why_ Sasson thought that an electronic camera with no moving parts was possible: Star Trek. That was his literal inspiration for the camera that was intended to annoy mechanical engineers by having no mechanical parts.
That's great! I often measure technological progress by how close we are to TNG. Like, there is a new lithotripsy wand that breaks up kidney stones with ultrasound. That feels like something you would see Beverly Crusher use in sick bay.
Side note, the wand was developed to solve for: trip to Mars -> bone density loss -> minerals in blood -> debilitating kidney stone 1 year from a hospital.
Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals.
The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pictures that reveal something essential.
I’m hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits. Apple TV’s “Silo” has a wonderful production design but it’s too claustrophobic to fulfill my wish.
“The Mote in God’s Eye” would be my pick if I could get any IP developed with this approach.
Battlestar Galactica (2004) has an aesthetic like that. While they do use mainframe computers, they avoid all networking due to the risk of being hacked. Galactica is the only Battlestar to survive the first episode specifically because it’s the only one that still uses this outdated technology.
Plus, it’s just one of the best TV shows ever made in any genre.
One of my earliest serious fan sites I made. I forgot the name, might be able to pull it up on archive, but I had a section with the whole cast each with a "cylon suspicion meter" bar. Great memories.
> old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits
Reminds me of Harry Turtledove's The Road Not Taken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...
> I'm hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits.
This is what I hoped for Foundation, to replicate the 1940s now-retrofuturism I imagine while reading the books. Alas, it wasn't to be.
I seem to recall a scene from the book where a man is smoking a cigar in an office and prints out his computer output rather than reading from a screen. It was delightfully retrofuturist (or whatever the opposite of anachronistic is).
That would have been brilliant.
The “Foundation” we got has good moments and excellent production values, but it doesn’t seem to know or care exactly what the rules of its universe are. (I don’t like how Hari Seldon was apparently a font of semi-magical technology invented all at once and in secret…)
If I recall, in the novel Solaris, set largely on a spaceship orbiting a distant, sentient planet, one of the characters uses a slide rule.
Idea for a sci fi novel: total reliance on chatbots that predict what you want to hear based on the average of the internet ends the astonishing run of innovation we've had since the industrial revolution, and returns us to the situation humanity has been in for most of our history, in which technology develops slowly, if at all. What do things look like in a thousand years, when we're still relying on the current equivalent of slide rules and analog film?
So wild. The wire-wrap boards are truly frightening to look at.
And the photos in the article of the old "instamatic" Kodak film cameras (especially that 110 pocket camera) suddenly brought back to my mind that formaldehyde-like smell of developer chemicals when I worked at a One-Hour-Photo lab when in high school.
The first spy satellites had to literally eject their film back into orbit to be picked up by the CIA and the pictures were then developed in a dark room.
Amazing, a whole article about a camera without a single photo from that camera
The PetaPixel article has a sample, though the original photo from this article is lost.
https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-digital-...
https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-Digit...
I wonder if any exist on the internet and if the camera is still functional.
Edit: it's very likely that no photos exist because the tapes were being reused and there are many reasons why the camera has been nonfunctional for a long time now.
Here's an example image: https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-Digit...
Captured on Kodak film, I suspect.
I wonder if that's actually original capture or just an emulation for the purposes of the exhibit.
Yeah, the camera probably hasn't been in functioning condition for decades and people at Kodak likely didn't see much historical value in archiving those tapes.
I don't doubt this description of what happened, but the sad irony in a company whose product was producing tools to generate archival copies of images, not recognising the value of retaining archival copies of images... facepalm.
CMOS vs CCD for those curious:
https://petapixel.com/what-is-ccd-cmos-sensor/
and https://www.teledynevisionsolutions.com/learn/learning-cente...
The popular notion that "Kodak invented the thing that killed them" is basically nonsense.
Steve Sasson's tale of technical struggle in 01975 at Kodak is real, but dozens of other people were doing the same thing at the same time at different companies, or in their dormitories, because at that point the problem of building a handheld digital camera had been reduced to a problem that one guy could solve with off-the-shelf parts. In fact, earlier the same year, a digital camera design was published as a hobbyist project in Popular Electronics, using a 32×32 MOS sensor, and commercialized as the Cromemco Cyclops. (You just had to keep it plugged in; you couldn't take it with you to the Little League game, even though it was small enough to lift in one hand.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Cyclops
The reduction of the problem to such a manageable size was the result of numerous small advances over the previous 50 years.
Landsat 1 was a digital camera that was initially planned in 01970 and launched into space in 01972; it just weighed a tonne, so you couldn't hold it in your hand. https://directory.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/landsat-1-... says:
> It quickly became apparent that the digital image data, acquired by the MSS (Multispectral Scanner) instrument, a whiskbroom scanning device, were of great value for a broad range of applications and scientific investigations. For the first time, the data of an orbiting instrument were available in digital form, quantified at the instrument level - providing a great deal of flexibility by offering all the capabilities of digital processing, storage, and communication.
Landsat 1 was built by General Electric, RCA, NASA, and subcontractors, and the MSS digital camera component in particular was designed by Virginia Norwood at the Hughes Aircraft Company, not at Kodak.
Ranger 7 in 01964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_7 was an electronic camera that was successfully launched into the moon and returned close-range photos of it over radio links, but, as far as I can tell, it wasn't a digital camera; the RF links were analog TV signals.
Handheld electronic cameras, for a very strong person, might date back to Philo T. Farnsworth's Image Dissector in 01927 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Experiments_... or Zworykin's Iconoscope in 01933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_camera_tube#Iconoscope, but in practice these were only reduced to handheld-plus-backpack size in the 01950s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_video_camera#Hist.... Farnsworth was at the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, not at Kodak. Zworykin was at Westinghouse and RCA, not at Kodak.
The first experimental digitization of a signal from an electronic camera was probably done by Frank Gray at Bell Labs, not at Kodak, in 01947, for which he invented the Gray Code. To be able to keep up with live full-motion video data, his analog-to-digital converter was a sort of cathode-ray tube with a shadow mask in it with the code cut into it; this is described in patent 2,632,058, granted in 01953: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a3/d7/f2/0343f5f....
The video camera tubes that were the only way to build electronic cameras up to the 50s, and which made the cameras large and heavy, were supplanted by CCDs like the 100×100 Fairchild MV-101 that Sasson used in his prototype at Kodak. The CCD was developed by Smith and Boyle at Bell Labs, not at Kodak, in 01969–70: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device
However, any DRAM chip is also an image sensor, which is why they are encapsulated in black epoxy to prevent them from sensing light; without the CCD, we would have had CMOS image sensors anyway just because of the light-sensitivity of silicon. In fact, the Cromemco Cyclops used just such a chip.
The fundamental thing that made digital cameras not just possible but inevitable was microelectronics, a technology which owes its existence in 01975 to a long series of innovations including the point-contact transistor (Bardeen and Brattain, 01947, Bell Labs, not at Kodak); the junction transistor (Shockley, 01948, Bell Labs, not at Kodak); the monolithic integrated circuit (Noyce, 01959, Fairchild Semi, not at Kodak); the planar process (Hoerni, 01959, Fairchild Semi, not at Kodak); the MOSFET (Kahng and Atalla, 01959, Bell Labs, not at Kodak); the self-aligned silicon gate (Faggin, 01968, Fairchild Semi, not at Kodak); and, as mentioned in the article, the microprocessor. The microprocessor was overdetermined in the same way as the handheld digital camera, and arose basically simultaneously at RCA, Motorola, TI, and Intel, but whoever we decide invented the microprocessor, it certainly wasn't done at Kodak.
It's interesting that you differentiate between analog and digital electronic cameras.
My first "digital" camera was one of the Canon Ion ones that use floppy discs but actually record the photos in analog, so technically just an "electronic camera", but was marketed as a "Still Video Camera" (!). You had to use a video capture card to get the images into the PC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Floppy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G_1uy_7B5w
Holy shit, this is amazing. I had no idea anything like this ever existed.
How did you first come to use a five digit variation of the Gregorian calendar?
https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...
Kraken often had very informative posts, but I often feel that he invests in such posts only to promote his five-digit ideology.
That's fine by me. The informative posts are worth it.
This is my first time noticing one of their posts, but to me it evokes the ideals of the Long Now Foundation, putting our thoughts in a future-forward stance.
Thanks!
After seeing the pic of it, it’s less of a “handheld” camera and more of a “handsheld” camera
>"But Joy had followed me back because she was curious, you know, and she was standing in the hallway. We turned around, and Joy says: 'Needs work,' and turned out and walked away."
This part reminded me of the Black Triangle (2004):
https://archive.ph/qqOnP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698753
Alternative archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20130927070227/http://rampantgam...
I really like this, thank you.
Kodak should have ruled the digital imaging space. Instead, they collapsed.
A lot of it was because the film people kneecapped the digital folks.
Film was very profitable.
Until it wasn't.
The company that I worked for, was a classic film company. When digital was first getting a foothold (early 1990s), I used to get lectures about how film would never die...etc.
A few years later, it was as if film never existed. The transition was so sudden, and so complete, that, if you blinked, you missed it.
Years later, I saw the same kind of thing happen to my company, that happened to Kodak.
The iPhone came out, with its embedded camera, and that basically killed the discrete point-and-shoot market, which was very profitable for my company.
When the iPhone first came out, the marketing folks at my company laughed at it.
Then, they stopped laughing.
Kodak invented the thing that killed them.
I worked for a company that was beautifully run with great, smart, hardworking people, led by someone that had been with the technology since the beginning. We almost immediately got acquired by a public company that used different technology that saw us as a threat, and the founders were retained long enough to see their company and workers basically trashed into a mediocre state.
This is a very common story from what I understand, whether the intent is either “if you can’t beat them, buy them!” or even if it’s just to grow.
In Kodak’s case, I wonder if both those that saw it as the future and those that saw it as the end wanted to support and control it.
Also, it never ceases to amaze that some of the best things and the most dangerous things are (1) not those that you planned on and (2) involve someone bending and breaking rules to persue a passion project.
I mean, it was one of those inevitable technologies.
Other companies had already invented the CCD, it was only a matter of time before someone would digitise the signal and pair it with a storage device. It was an obvious concept.
All Kodak really did was develop an obvious concept into a prototype many years before it could be viable, and then receive a patent for it.
> "It's really not a very fair statement to say that they missed the digital photography that they actually had invented," he says.
A tale as old as Capitalism…
I'd encourage people to look at the history of Fujifilm (the Japanese peer to Kodak) to see why they didn't fail, but Kodak did.
https://petapixel.com/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm-thrived-a-...
TL;DR: Fujifilm diversified quickly, Kodak clung to the film business for far too long.
That’s not an accurate summary of the article. The problem was that Kodak stuck to the photography business for too long. As the article states, in the early 2000s they were the number one seller of digital cameras. It just turns out making consumer digital cameras was a “crappy business” as their CEO went on to say. Fujifilm diversified into healthcare, cosmetics, and making LCD display films.
What's crazy is that Fujifilm now, once again, makes more money on photographic film than anything else they do, thanks to how popular the Instax instant cameras are.
That's just how wildly profitable film is.
engineers were probably screaming about digital. middle management (who are the only ones irreplaceable by ai btw) probably called it a fad
Cool story!