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“I’ll just make one [a camera] with no moving parts, and that’ll annoy the hell out of them [mechanical engineers].”
The story of how the first digital camera was conceived at Eastman Kodak by a young electrical engineer is a fascinating story. Steve Sasson, newly hired at the company, and knowing nothing about how to build a mechanical camera, thought it would be neat if he could build a camera with no moving parts… “just to annoy the mechanical engineers.”
The first digital camera he ended up building used borrowed spare parts and a 100 pixels x 100 pixels CCD image sensor. The fixed shutter speed was 1/20s and the data took 23 seconds to be written onto a cassette tape used as the storage device.
Of course, Kodak business managers were quick to compare the first digital camera and its output to Kodak’s existing film, and worriedly asking all the questions about what was going to happen to all their film, photography paper and printing business.
That was in 1975. Kodak’s first consumer digital camera, the DC40, came out in 1995. And the rest, as they say, is history.
>> Read the story at BBC.com
