In December 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson
invented something that would, decades later, revolutionize photography:
the world’s first digital camera. It was the
size of a toaster, and captured black and white images at a resolution
of 100×100 - or 0.01 megapixels in today’s marketing terminology. The
images were stored on cassette tape, taking 23 seconds to write. The
camera uses an ADC from Motorola, a bog-standard (for the 1970s) lens
from a Kodak movie camera, and a CCD chip from Fairchild Semiconductor -
the same technology that digital cameras still use today. To playback
the images, a special computer and tape reader setup (pictured below)
was built, outputting the grainy images on a standard TV. It took a
further 23 seconds to read each image from tape.
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