Via Doug Ross-
An Eastman Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson invented the first digital camera back in 1975...
In a Kodak blog post written in 2007, Sasson explains how it was constructed:
It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.
Here are some specs: The 8 pound camera recorded 0.01 megapixel black and white photos to a cassette tape. The first photograph took 23 seconds to create...
To play back images, data was read from the tape and then displayed on a television set:Alas, much like the stale suits at 'Big Blue' IBM failed to grasp the monumental significance/value of the initial Windows OS presented to them by Bill Gates, Rochester NY-based Eastman Kodak didn't seem to see the business potential -nor threat to their cash cow film business- in their own R+D department's invention... today they are bankrupt, a mere shell of the former blue-chip enterprise that all but controlled the consumer photography business in the US and many other countries.
