[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.