1975: The First Digital Camera

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via ISO50 Blog - The Blog of Scott Hansen (Tycho / ISO50) by Scott on
8/11/10




I’ve had these images laying around for ages and stumbled across them
again tonight. This is a prototype digital camera Kodak produced way
back in 1975. The “toaster-sized” system relied on a cassette tape for
recording data. The digitized images took 23 seconds to record to tape
which then had to be played back using a specialized system (shown in
the second photo — note the name of the Motorola computer,
“EXORciser”). This is one of those times where I’m tempted to say “look
how far we’ve come in such a short time!”. But damn, 1975? I wasn’t
even born. I never would have guessed they had this sort of tech back
then.

I’m really not sure I’d be doing the things I do now if I was coming up
back in those days. Either computers have made me lazy, or I’m just
inherently lazy, but I honestly can’t imagine dealing with
23-second-per-image write times and cassette tapes.

Check out this piece about the process of creating the prototype by one
of the original team members, Steve Sasson: “Plugged In – We Had No
Idea“

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Post tags: digital cameras, kodak



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