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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>"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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
CMOS vs CCD for those curious:
https://petapixel.com/what-is-ccd-cmos-sensor/
and https://www.teledynevisionsolutions.com/learn/learning-cente...
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.
But kodak did do digital cameras. My first one was a Kodak.
After seeing the pic of it, it’s less of a “handheld” camera and more of a “handsheld” camera
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.
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.)
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.
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-...
Amazing, a whole article about a camera without a single photo from that camera
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.
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.
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.
>"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
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.
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.
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.
engineers were probably screaming about digital. middle management (who are the only ones irreplaceable by ai btw) probably called it a fad
Kodak invented the thing that killed them.
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.
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.
> "It's really not a very fair statement to say that they missed the digital photography that they actually had invented," he says.
A tale as old as Capitalism…
Cool story!