[HN Gopher] A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first ...
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A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld
digital camera
Author : selvan
Score : 74 points
Date : 2025-12-08 13:04 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| HardwareLust wrote:
| Cool story!
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Kodak invented the thing that killed them.
| stavros wrote:
| > "It's really not a very fair statement to say that they
| missed the digital photography that they actually had
| invented," he says.
| phire wrote:
| I mean, it was one of those inevitable technologies.
|
| Other companies had already invented the CCD, it was only a
| matter of time before someone would digitise the signal and
| pair it with a storage device. It was an obvious concept.
|
| All Kodak really did was develop an obvious concept into a
| prototype many years before it could be viable, and then
| receive a patent for it.
| nvmind2 wrote:
| I worked for a company that was beautifully run with great,
| smart, hardworking people, led by someone that had been with
| the technology since the beginning. We almost immediately got
| acquired by a public company that used different technology
| that saw us as a threat, and the founders were retained long
| enough to see their company and workers basically trashed into
| a mediocre state.
|
| This is a very common story from what I understand, whether the
| intent is either "if you can't beat them, buy them!" or even if
| it's just to grow.
|
| In Kodak's case, I wonder if both those that saw it as the
| future and those that saw it as the end wanted to support and
| control it.
|
| Also, it never ceases to amaze that some of the best things and
| the most dangerous things are (1) not those that you planned on
| and (2) involve someone bending and breaking rules to persue a
| passion project.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| A tale as old as Capitalism...
| user28712094 wrote:
| engineers were probably screaming about digital. middle
| management (who are the only ones irreplaceable by ai btw)
| probably called it a fad
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| Amazing, a whole article about a camera without a single photo
| from that camera
| Sharlin wrote:
| I wonder if any exist on the internet and if the camera is
| still functional.
|
| Edit: it's very likely that no photos exist because the tapes
| were being reused and there are many reasons why the camera has
| been nonfunctional for a long time now.
| ginko wrote:
| Yeah, the camera probably hasn't been in functioning
| condition for decades and people at Kodak likely didn't see
| much historical value in archiving those tapes.
| pnut wrote:
| I don't doubt this description of what happened, but the
| sad irony in a company whose product was producing tools to
| generate archival copies of images, not recognising the
| value of retaining archival copies of images... facepalm.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| Here's an example image:
| https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-
| Digit...
|
| Captured on Kodak film, I suspect.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| The PetaPixel article has a sample, though the original photo
| from this article is lost.
|
| https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-digital-...
|
| https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2022/09/Prorotype-Digit...
| Sharlin wrote:
| A very similar PetaPixel article with a couple more technical
| details: [1] In particular, it describes the reason for the first
| corrupted image - they had wired the four-bit output in the wrong
| order so that the high bit was the lowest and vice versa. Thus,
| all-ones still looked white and all-zeros black, but the rest of
| the shades were scrambled.
|
| [1] https://petapixel.com/how-steve-sasson-invented-the-
| digital-...
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| It's a shame they didn't capture that first image. You'd think
| someone would have had a camera handy!
|
| I was glad to hear Sasson found a place at Eastman-Kodak and
| worked there for the rest of his career.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Kodak should have ruled the digital imaging space. Instead, they
| collapsed.
|
| A lot of it was because the film people kneecapped the digital
| folks.
|
| Film was _very_ profitable.
|
| Until it wasn't.
|
| The company that I worked for, was a classic film company. When
| digital was first getting a foothold (early 1990s), I used to get
| lectures about how film would never die...etc.
|
| A few years later, it was as if film never existed. The
| transition was so sudden, and so complete, that, if you blinked,
| you missed it.
|
| Years later, I saw the same kind of thing happen to my company,
| that happened to Kodak.
|
| The iPhone came out, with its embedded camera, and that basically
| killed the discrete point-and-shoot market, which was _very_
| profitable for my company.
|
| When the iPhone first came out, the marketing folks at my company
| laughed at it.
|
| Then, they stopped laughing.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Sometimes I think a lot of myself. Sometimes I don't. During the
| times I do, I console myself about my lack of success by thinking
| that I have never been in the right place at the right time.
|
| But had I been in that place at that time, I would not have
| invented the digital camera. That guy Sasson was clearly capable
| far beyond the rest of us.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That's a poignant observation. There are "times and places" for
| things. And whether you or I would have been "the right person"
| at that time is hard to know.
|
| I consider Wozniak (obvious example) who was at the "right time
| and place" in the early 1970's. He at the engineering capital
| of the U.S. (Silicon Valley -- already known by that name at
| the time) knowing adults in engineering fields that could get
| him otherwise expensive and new for the time microprocessor
| chips... just as the chips were becoming more affordable--just
| as Don Lancaster's "TV Typewriter" and the "Altair 8800" began
| to grace the cover of _Popular Electronics_ ...
|
| Woz seemed to flounder, or be overwhelmed somewhat, a decade
| later when hacks with a 555 Timer chip, a few NAND gates or
| NTSC timing hijinks to get color was not where the industry was
| going. He took a back-seat on the engineering side.
|
| At the same time, not to diminish Woz's skills in 1975, there
| were a lot of other smart kids in the "Valley" then that did
| have their home-brew computers become a product.
|
| (And then so much more to unpack when you allow for Job's
| contributions, U.S. schools purchasing Apple computers, etc.)
| doug_durham wrote:
| He is an exceptional engineer. In 1986 I developed an instant
| messaging system that worked across the internet on X Windows.
| It was very popular at HP where I worked. It ran on X Windows
| and had many of the features of modern messaging systems like
| WhatsApp. I didn't think twice about it. A few years later I
| saw how these apps took the world by storm once the internet
| became popular. I think I had caught lightning in a bottle but
| didn't appreciate it. It's kind of the opposite of Sasson.
| However in both cases we were lousy evangelists. Also I'm not
| an exceptional engineer.
| dotancohen wrote:
| It's also interesting to note _why_ Sasson thought that an
| electronic camera with no moving parts was possible: Star Trek.
| That was his literal inspiration for the camera that was
| intended to annoy mechanical engineers by having no mechanical
| parts.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| So wild. The wire-wrap boards are truly frightening to look at.
|
| And the photos in the article of the old "instamatic" Kodak film
| cameras (especially that 110 pocket camera) suddenly brought back
| to my mind that formaldehyde-like smell of developer chemicals
| when I worked at a One-Hour-Photo lab when in high school.
| WangComputers wrote:
| Very few people understand the real reason why Kodak failed to
| dominate the digital world. It actually dates back to a 300
| million dollar lawsuit which Honeywell won against Minolta over a
| patent for an autofocus system. The Japanese camera companies
| were so outraged over this perceived injustice that they vowed
| never to engage in technology sharing with American companies
| ever again and this ended up crippling Kodak's ambitions.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| But kodak did do digital cameras. My first one was a Kodak.
| ronsor wrote:
| > they vowed never to engage in technology sharing with
| American companies ever again
|
| If this were really the case, I'm surprised the US government
| didn't engage in antitrust action.
| immibis wrote:
| Very US-centric comment. The US can't force entities of an
| entirely separate country to share technology.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| I'd encourage people to look at the history of Fujifilm (the
| Japanese peer to Kodak) to see why they didn't fail, but Kodak
| did.
|
| https://petapixel.com/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm-thrived-a-...
|
| TL;DR: Fujifilm diversified quickly, Kodak clung to the film
| business for far too long.
| sgerenser wrote:
| That's not an accurate summary of the article. The problem was
| that Kodak stuck to the _photography_ business for too long. As
| the article states, in the early 2000s they were the number one
| seller of digital cameras. It just turns out making consumer
| digital cameras was a "crappy business" as their CEO went on to
| say. Fujifilm diversified into healthcare, cosmetics, and
| making LCD display films.
| andai wrote:
| >"But Joy had followed me back because she was curious, you know,
| and she was standing in the hallway. We turned around, and Joy
| says: 'Needs work,' and turned out and walked away."
|
| This part reminded me of the Black Triangle (2004):
|
| https://archive.ph/qqOnP
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698753
| parpfish wrote:
| After seeing the pic of it, it's less of a "handheld" camera and
| more of a "handsheld" camera
| neom wrote:
| CMOS vs CCD for those curious:
|
| https://petapixel.com/what-is-ccd-cmos-sensor/
|
| and https://www.teledynevisionsolutions.com/learn/learning-
| cente...
| kragen wrote:
| 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 32x32 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 100x100 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.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| How did you first come to use a five digit variation of the
| Gregorian calendar?
| dotancohen wrote:
| Kraken often had very informative posts, but I often feel
| that he invests in such posts only to promote his five-digit
| ideology.
|
| That's fine by me. The informative posts are worth it.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| This is my first time noticing one of their posts, but to
| me it evokes the ideals of the Long Now Foundation, putting
| our thoughts in a future-forward stance.
| pavlov wrote:
| Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully
| ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures
| still fiddle with film chemicals.
|
| The first book of David Brin's Uplift series was written in 1980
| and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien
| ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the
| major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to
| develop pictures that reveal something essential.
|
| I'm hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage
| aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this
| old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to
| entirely lack integrated circuits. Apple TV's "Silo" has a
| wonderful production design but it's too claustrophobic to
| fulfill my wish.
|
| "The Mote in God's Eye" would be my pick if I could get any IP
| developed with this approach.
| bananaflag wrote:
| > I'm hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a
| vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and
| magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires
| that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits.
|
| This is what I hoped for Foundation, to replicate the 1940s
| now-retrofuturism I imagine while reading the books. Alas, it
| wasn't to be.
| pavlov wrote:
| That would have been brilliant.
|
| The "Foundation" we got has good moments and excellent
| production values, but it doesn't seem to know or care
| exactly what the rules of its universe are. (I don't like how
| Hari Seldon was apparently a font of semi-magical technology
| invented all at once and in secret...)
| stevula wrote:
| I seem to recall a scene from the book where a man is smoking
| a cigar in an office and prints out his computer output
| rather than reading from a screen. It was delightfully
| retrofuturist (or whatever the opposite of anachronistic is).
| munchler wrote:
| Battlestar Galactica (2004) has an aesthetic like that. While
| they do use mainframe computers, they avoid all networking due
| to the risk of being hacked. Galactica is the only Battlestar
| to survive the first episode specifically because it's the only
| one that still uses this outdated technology.
|
| Plus, it's just one of the best TV shows ever made in any
| genre.
| pests wrote:
| One of my earliest serious fan sites I made. I forgot the
| name, might be able to pull it up on archive, but I had a
| section with the whole cast each with a "cylon suspicion
| meter" bar. Great memories.
| dmd wrote:
| > old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem
| to entirely lack integrated circuits
|
| Reminds me of Harry Turtledove's The Road Not Taken.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...
| throwyawayyyy wrote:
| If I recall, in the novel Solaris, set largely on a spaceship
| orbiting a distant, sentient planet, one of the characters uses
| a slide rule.
|
| Idea for a sci fi novel: total reliance on chatbots that
| predict what you want to hear based on the average of the
| internet ends the astonishing run of innovation we've had since
| the industrial revolution, and returns us to the situation
| humanity has been in for most of our history, in which
| technology develops slowly, if at all. What do things look like
| in a thousand years, when we're still relying on the current
| equivalent of slide rules and analog film?
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