The First

I know I have not posted Monday's photo yet. Truth is, I accidentally deleted my photos from the camera today (doh!), though there really wasn't anything interesting in them anyway. So I'll take a few photos tomorrow and post up two and we can pretend one of them is for Monday. Till then, I thought I should dedicate an entry to something I just read about a few minutes ago: the world's first digital camera! Without it, I would not be faux-photo-blogging (mostly because I would've been too lazy to scan my film photos)!

In December 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson invented something that would, decades later, revolutionize photography: the world’s first digital camera. It was the size of a toaster, and captured black and white images at a resolution of 100×100 - or 0.01 megapixels in today’s marketing terminology. The images were stored on cassette tape, taking 23 seconds to write. The camera uses an ADC from Motorola, a bog-standard (for the 1970s) lens from a Kodak movie camera, and a CCD chip from Fairchild Semiconductor - the same technology that digital cameras still use today. To playback the images, a special computer and tape reader setup (pictured below) was built, outputting the grainy images on a standard TV. It took a further 23 seconds to read each image from tape.