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March 22, 2007
[ THE KILLER APPLICATION ]
Steve Sasson with a mockup of the first digital camera.
WAY BACK IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1977, Ken Olsen, the president of Digital Equipment Corporation, earned himself a permanent place in dictionaries of quotations. Ken reckoned that “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
At the time he was justified in making his prediction. When IBM launched its first DOS based personal computers in 1981 there wasn’t a lot you could do with them. Early adopters -- the boys -- were fascinated by the PC for its own sake. They played primitive PacMan games on them. They tried their hand at a little programming in the Basic language. Some got themselves a primitive dot matrix printer and turned their PCs into glorified typewriters, but most didn’t have all that much to write.
The personal computer was not like other devices, created to meet a need, such as washing machines or vacuum cleaners. It was a fascinating doodad that had no application in the real world of the average person.
Well, we know what happened next. Graphical user interfaces, hard drives, faster processors, more elaborate software and, in 1994 the first consumer digital camera, the Apple Quick Take. This camera was the result of collaboration between Kodak and Apple. Does anyone at Kodak regret the research and development money and scientific skill that they put into developing the device that would destroy the company’s traditional business?
We were set thinking along these lines by an item in the latest issue of PC Update, the official organ of the Melbourne PC User Group. Graham Dean, of the Geelong branch of the Group, writes: “Being a general group, sometimes we wonder if we are a computer group with an active interest in photography or vice-versa.”
Mr Dean reports that two years ago there were only two digital camera users in his group. Six months ago when a show of hands was called for at a meeting it turned out that every person there owned a digital camera. And these days the most requested meeting topics are to do with buying a camera, using photo editing software and managing digital photo collections.
It looks as though the personal computer has at last found its justification. Word processing, for most people, was never a necessity. Database programs are overkill for most homes. Games are fun, but essentially frivolous. Digital photography now looks like the need the PC was created to meet.
The bold innovations that have got us to this point are breathtaking. When Steve Sasson began his work on the first digital camera in the Kodak laboratories in 1974 he had a light sensitive, charge coupled device of very low resolution -- a mere 0.01 megapixels. It was a monochrome sensor.
Between then and now it was necessary to increase the resolution, devise a way of turning the monochrome image into colour, invent a compression technique so that files could be stored on portable memory, invent the portable memory device, democratise the Internet, create high resolution colour monitors and increase the processing power of personal computers.
Alongside the hardware developments there had to be improvements in image processing and editing software.
No wonder that a past chairman of IBM reckoned that there might one day be world wide demand for as many as five computers. Perfectly reasonable prediction at the time.
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Posted by terry at March 22, 2007 03:58 AM
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