The 1st Digital Camera is now 50 years old.

Here is Steve Sasson now 75 years old talking about it from his Kodak days when he showed it to Kodak Management.

www.bbc.com/future/article/20251205-how-the-handheld-digital-camera-was-born

"But when a 23-year-old Sasson joined Kodak in 1973, he felt out of place. He wasn't a research chemist who would work on new films, nor was he a mechanical engineer ready to design new cameras that would work with Kodak films. Instead, he was an electrical engineer, and something about the whole photographic process didn't sit well with him."

Hi,

I joined that party 42 years ago in 1983 working for IBM. We had the idea for a printed circuit board manufacturing vision systems coincidental with our first designs using surface mount components. They liked to misplace and required a lot of human vision time, which tended to miss a fault here and there. That led to many failing products on their assembly lines. Which were not in the same factory as the board production. Meaning lots of extra cost to swap out bad boards and have a repair tech correct the problem.

The solution was to have a photo of a good board loaded into a computer and then shoot every board as it came to the end of the line and compare them. Faulty looking ones could be sent to a repair tech right there at the board plant. But, how to take a picture?

The first idea was a Polaroid and then scan that into the mainframe. As you might think, that's cumbersome. So we wanted a digital camera. But we at IBM Poughkeepsie NY didn't work on digital imaging sensors. But I knew Kodak at Rochester NY did from some DoD projects I was working on.

So we had them supply us some rather costly monochrome digital sensors and help us make up some cameras to pull this particular trick off. Worked like a charm. :)

Stan

Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer

Thank you for sharing this story. Interesting!

Kodak also had its 13 Months - 28 Days each Month International Calendar from 1929 to 1988/89. The Months and Days can be found in Nature, for example on a Turtle.

A 13 Month Calendar also follows the Moon Cycles?

I was reminded of my first home computer in the '80s - a BBC model B - which, like the Kodak prototype digital camera, also used a cassette deck for storage and a TV for display.

Hi,

My first home computer was a MOS Technologies KIM-1 in the late 70s. No cassette, you wrote the code on paper and keyed it in with a hexadecimal keyboard. No TV set, but it had address and data LED segment display. Handy! And a huge 4k of memory. One had to add those fancy things like keyboard, display and tape storage. But, then one also had to add costly memory to be able to use the fancy things. :P

Taught me how the things worked, though. I was all ready for that first job at IBM in 1981 working on the 5150 Personal Computer. Which, BTW, sported a cassette tape port. ;)

Stan

Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer

According to ChatGPT:

Lunar calendar = based on Moon cycles (≈29.53 days per month)

Year ≈ 354 days, so dates drift relative to seasons

Some calendars add a leap month to fix the drift (lunisolar)

Ergo, 13 lunar months = 384 and a bit solar days ,,,