by kragen | 2025-12-13 17:03:10+00:00
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.