When there were no iPhones or Instagram and only one company reigned sovereign: the Eastman Kodak Company.
In the early 1970s young engineer Steve Sasson started working at Kodak. Two years later, in 1975, he invented digital photography and developed the first digital camera mimic.
Sasson, just 25 years old, was the true inventor of the process that today allows us to take pictures with our phones and tablets, send images around the world in a few seconds and share them with millions of people through social networks and the Internet.
It was this technical process that dismantled the existing photographic industry, at that time entirely dominated by Kodak, and unleashed an entire decade of protests by professional photographers, claiming that their profession was being ruined by the new technology.
As soon as he started working at Kodak, Steve Sasson received a task he considered unimportant – to check if there was any practical use for the Charged Coupled Device – CCD, invented a few years earlier. Sasson began to manipulate the device, which consisted of converting a two-dimensional luminous pattern into an electric signal. He wanted to capture images with the method, but the electric pulses dissipated too quickly.
He decided to use the nascent process of scanning – turning electrical signals into binary numbers (zeros and ones) – but another problem arose: storing the images in RAM (which barely existed in 1975) and saving them on a magnetic tape. The end result was a square monstrengo coupled with a lens borrowed from a Super-8 camera, a portable cassette recorder, an analog / digital converter, and half a dozen printed circuit boards.
It seems strange today, but it is good to remember that this was before the PCs (personal computers). The first Apple kit would start selling only the following year, 1976. The fact is that the gadget worked, but displeased Steve’s bosses.
Kodak’s commercial and marketing departments soon sizzled: “We have the monopoly of the American and world market for photography and we make money at every stage of the process: the cameras, the film, and the revelation. Why switch this successful business model?” And they ordered the young man to forget the new invention.
Less than two decades later, who would say, digital photography technology has invaded our lives and taken over the world!
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via Nehemias Gueiros
[Photo credit: Tiago Muraro, Unsplash.com.]