A 'toaster with a Lens': the Story Behind the First Handheld Digital Camera

[1] https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-digital-...

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.

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.

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.

This part reminded me of the Black Triangle (2004):

https://archive.ph/qqOnP

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698753

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, 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. That reduction 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 the CCDs 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.

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, not at Kodak); and, as mentioned in the article, the microprocessor, an invention which was overdetermined in the same way as the handheld digital camera, but whoever we decide invented the microprocessor, it certainly wasn't done at Kodak.

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.

https://petapixel.com/what-is-ccd-cmos-sensor/

and https://www.teledynevisionsolutions.com/learn/learning-cente...

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.