In the week that Apple released the new iPad Mini and Microsoft released Windows 8 and its Surface tablet my colleague Bob Doran pointed me back to the future - 1975 to be precise. Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, invented the digital camera in December 1975. In a Kodak blog post written in 2007, before Kodak went bankrupt, Sasson explains how it was constructed: "It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like."
We all become mesmerized by the new and the shiny but this reminds us that being first or being an established powerful company doesn't inevitably result in long term success. Sasson ends his post with, "The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.” - how did Kodak get it so wrong.
You've probably seen the news today, Kodak has filed for bankruptcy and become the most recent victim of the digital revolution that Kodak's management struggled, and failed, for a decade to adapt to. I wrote this in chapter 10 of The Universal Machine a few months ago:
"...they are an example of computers transforming the way we do things. For example, digital cameras have transformed the way we all take and share photos - no more buying expensive rolls of film, taking a few precious photos, waiting for the roll to be full, sending the film off to be developed and finally getting 24 photos back, half of which are blurry and badly composed. Now we shoot dozens of photos, delete the ones we don’t like, crop, enhance and improve the ones we do, and then share them with our friends on Flickr and Facebook."
Take a while to think about this transformation. Kodak was a part of everyones' life, their family history. My parents used to have an American couple they knew send them Kodak color Super 8 film in the 1960s because it was very hard to get in England. My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic - I loved it, it made me feel like an adult since taking photos was serious adult business. I'm sure many of you remember your father (it was always father in control of the camera) taking forever to compose a shot whilst the family fidgeted and smiles froze on faces. You'll also remember the excitement when the developed prints came back in the post or were collected from the chemists. The laughter and groans as prints revealed you looking silly or happy and the ribbing the "photographer" got for every blurred or over exposed photo.
Those days are long gone. Now photography is more instant than my Instamatic could have dreamed of. I take photographs every day and literally hundreds when I'm on holiday. Separate cameras themselves are even threatened as smartphones include better and better built in photography. My new iPhone has an 8 megapixel camera and is ready to snap a photo in a second. Why would I carry a separate camera? Kodak's moment has passed, but our love of taking photos hasn't.
[PS If you have hundreds of digital photos, particularly treasured ones of your children, please please please upload them to a cloud file storage service. Dropbox, SugarSync, Picasa, iCloud and others are free or inexpensive. You will feel terrible when that hard drive fails or your laptop is stolen with all your photos on.]
