page_title: Cromemco Cyclops
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Cromemco Cyclops / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Letter to Harry Garland from Art Salsberg (Editorial Director of Popular Electronics) accepting the Cyclops Camera for publication and requesting a tutorial article on image sensors. The tutorial article appeared in the January 1975 issue, and the Cyclops Camera appeared as a cover story in February 1975. The Cyclops was the world's first all-digital camera with a solid-state area image sensor.
context_page_description: The Cromemco Cyclops, introduced in 1975 by Cromemco, was the first commercial all-digital camera using a digital metal-oxide-semiconductor image sensor. It was also the first digital camera to be interfaced to a microcomputer. The digital sensor for the camera was a modified 1 kb dynamic RAM memory chip that offered a resolution of 32 × 32 pixels.
context_section_description: The Cyclops Camera was developed by Terry Walker, Harry Garland, and Roger Melen, and introduced as a hobbyist construction project in the February 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine.
  One month earlier the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer had been introduced in this same magazine. Les Solomon, technical editor of Popular Electronics, saw the value of interfacing the Cyclops to the Altair, and put Roger Melen (co-developer of the Cyclops) in contact with Ed Roberts (president of MITS) to discuss a collaboration.
  Roger Melen met with Ed Roberts at MITS headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Roberts encouraged Melen to interface the Cyclops to the Altair, promising to ship Melen an early Altair computer so that he and his colleagues could begin work on this project.
  Roger Melen formed a partnership with Harry Garland to produce the Cyclops Camera, and other products for the Altair computer. They named their new venture "Cromemco" after the Stanford University dormitory (Crothers Memorial Hall) where they both had lived as graduate students. In January 1976 MITS introduced the Cromemco Cyclops Camera as the first peripheral for the Altair Computer.
caption: Correspondence from the editorial director of Popular Electronics magazine, dated July 25, 1974, regarding publishing a cover story on the "CYCLOPS" camera project
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