[thumper]

I wonder if these guys would have gotten funding in today's corporate world, showing off that clunky device! It seems like this is a good example of the kind of leap that management needs to be able to take to see the potential of research work. We've all been so habituated to expecting "the world of tomorrow, today" that now researchers have to get a lot closer to productization (especially with respect to aesthetics) for higher-ups to "get it".

[sprout]

It sounds like they didn't get funding in the corporate world of 1976.

>Although we attempted to address the last question by applying Moore’s law to our architecture (15 to 20 years to reach the consumer), we had no idea how to answer these or the many other challenges that were suggested by this approach. An internal report was written and a patent was granted on this concept in 1978 (US 4,131,919).

That seems to be as far as Kodak took it until digital cameras really started to eat their lunch.

[rtyuioiujhygf]

Not really, Kodak where at the forefront of large low noise CCDs in the early 90s. They had industrial chips that wiped the floor with a lot of the science CCD suppliers. The first pro digital cameras where from Kodak, or had a Kodak CCD inside.

[TomOfTTB]

In fairness I'm not sure they should have gotten funding. While this is amazing in retrospect it was completely inviable in 1976 (the year Apple was founded). The digital photo revolution that followed was reliant on Personal Computers, GUIs, cheap memory and a many other things that wouldn't appear for decades.

The idea was just too far ahead of its time (though I suppose they could have been the most successful patent trolls of all time had they pursued it)

[brazzy]

By the time the technology became viable, the patent had expired, or was close to it. Of course, they could have tried to build a collection of auxillary patents around it later.