Invented in 1975 by Steven Sasson, this boxy behemoth was the world’s first digital camera.
In this interesting article, Sasson describes the creation of the revolutionary camera, and the rather (now) quaint way they stored and viewed the digital image.
It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set.
Link to the article.