End of the Roll

Back in the day, Bushboy’s Last on the Card challenge may have been called Last on the Roll. Film cameras and the silver halide strips we put in them are pretty much relics from a bygone era. I have a huge collection of both negative and positive (aka slide) film packed away along with two Minolta and one Pentax cameras. The task of converting the volume of film into digital files will be monumental should I ever get around to it.

Today we take pictures from our phones, by the hundreds. All of today’s camera systems take images using a charge-coupled device (CCD). Believe it or not, this terrific device led to Eastman-Kodak’s Steve Sasson inventing the first digital camera in the early 1970s. The images were stored on magnetic cassette and would be available to view on any television screen. When he presented the technology to the company they were less than impressed. Sasson discussed management’s reaction to the invention in a New York Times interview years later:

Kodak was the dominant U.S. photography brand and they didn’t want to cannibalize their own film business. A shortsighted decision that prevented them from filing patents and when they did make the switch to digital eighteen years later it was too little, too late.