Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 63 posts

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#31

Post by bananaflag »

pavlov wrote: post #29

Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals. The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pi…

> I'm hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits.

This is what I hoped for Foundation, to replicate the 1940s now-retrofuturism I imagine while reading the books. Alas, it wasn't to be.

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#32

Post by munchler »

pavlov wrote: post #29

Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals. The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pi…

Battlestar Galactica (2004) has an aesthetic like that. While they do use mainframe computers, they avoid all networking due to the risk of being hacked. Galactica is the only Battlestar to survive the first episode specifically because it’s the only one that still uses this outdated technology.

Plus, it’s just one of the best TV shows ever made in any genre.

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#33

Post by pests »

munchler wrote: post #32
pavlov wrote: post #29

Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals. The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pi…

Battlestar Galactica (2004) has an aesthetic like that. While they do use mainframe computers, they avoid all networking due to the risk of being hacked. Galactica is the only Battlestar to survive the first episode specifically because it’s the only one that still uses this outdated technology. Plus, it’s just one of the best TV shows ever made in any genre.

One of my earliest serious fan sites I made. I forgot the name, might be able to pull it up on archive, but I had a section with the whole cast each with a "cylon suspicion meter" bar. Great memories.

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#34

Post by pavlov »

bananaflag wrote: post #31
pavlov wrote: post #29

Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals. The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pi…

> I'm hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits. This is what I hoped for Foundation, to replicate the 1940s now-retrofuturism I imagine while reading the books. Alas, it wasn't to be.

That would have been brilliant.

The “Foundation” we got has good moments and excellent production values, but it doesn’t seem to know or care exactly what the rules of its universe are. (I don’t like how Hari Seldon was apparently a font of semi-magical technology invented all at once and in secret…)

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#35

Post by OgsyedIE »

kragen wrote: post #27

The popular notion that "Kodak invented the thing that killed them" is basically nonsense. Steve Sasson's tale of technical struggle in 01975 at Kodak is real, but dozens of other people were doing the same thing at the same time at different companies, or in their dormitories, because at that point the problem of building a handheld digital camera had been reduced to a problem that one guy could solve with off-the-s…

How did you first come to use a five digit variation of the Gregorian calendar?

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#36

Post by dmd »

pavlov wrote: post #29

Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals. The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pi…

> old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits

Reminds me of Harry Turtledove's The Road Not Taken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#37

Post by throwyawayyyy »

pavlov wrote: post #29

Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals. The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pi…

If I recall, in the novel Solaris, set largely on a spaceship orbiting a distant, sentient planet, one of the characters uses a slide rule.

Idea for a sci fi novel: total reliance on chatbots that predict what you want to hear based on the average of the internet ends the astonishing run of innovation we've had since the industrial revolution, and returns us to the situation humanity has been in for most of our history, in which technology develops slowly, if at all. What do things look like in a thousand years, when we're still relying on the current equivalent of slide rules and analog film?

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#38

Post by dotancohen »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #14

Sometimes I think a lot of myself. Sometimes I don't. During the times I do, I console myself about my lack of success by thinking that I have never been in the right place at the right time. But had I been in that place at that time, I would not have invented the digital camera. That guy Sasson was clearly capable far beyond the rest of us.

It's also interesting to note _why_ Sasson thought that an electronic camera with no moving parts was possible: Star Trek. That was his literal inspiration for the camera that was intended to annoy mechanical engineers by having no mechanical parts.

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#39

Post by dotancohen »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #35
kragen wrote: post #27

The popular notion that "Kodak invented the thing that killed them" is basically nonsense. Steve Sasson's tale of technical struggle in 01975 at Kodak is real, but dozens of other people were doing the same thing at the same time at different companies, or in their dormitories, because at that point the problem of building a handheld digital camera had been reduced to a problem that one guy could solve with off-the-s…

How did you first come to use a five digit variation of the Gregorian calendar?

Kraken often had very informative posts, but I often feel that he invests in such posts only to promote his five-digit ideology.

That's fine by me. The informative posts are worth it.

Re: A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera

#40

Post by stevula »

bananaflag wrote: post #31
pavlov wrote: post #29

Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals. The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pi…

> I'm hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits. This is what I hoped for Foundation, to replicate the 1940s now-retrofuturism I imagine while reading the books. Alas, it wasn't to be.

I seem to recall a scene from the book where a man is smoking a cigar in an office and prints out his computer output rather than reading from a screen. It was delightfully retrofuturist (or whatever the opposite of anachronistic is).
Post reply on HN