Summary

Steve Sasson was the inventor of the world’s first digital camera. Because it’s hard to imagine modern life without digital photography, it’s maybe easy to forget what a marvel it really is. And Sasson has been front and center for the entire digital photography revolutions. In this episode, he recounts for us the sort of skunkworks project that led to the first digital camera, recalls the long gestation the technology had within the company that developed it, Kodak, and toward the end, we get into a fascinating examination of technology disruption itself, for which Kodak is often held up as a poster-child, in terms of innovation challenges in the digital era.

You can see Steven demo the first digital camera in this brief video:

Inventor Portrait: Steven Sasson from David Friedman on Vimeo.

And some photos of the original prototype are here (click to enlarge):

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