How the first DSLR had military roots

The Kodak DCS was launched 35 years ago this month, in May 1991, but its roots go back a little further. Photo: Marc Aubry Despite Eastman Kodak making tentative steps back into the consumer photo film market, and its name still being applied to the front of countless licensees' compact cameras, there's still a widely-held sense of 'What if?' surrounding the Kodak name. Not only did the company dominate the film industry, it also did more than its share of founding photography's digital age. It was a Kodak engineer, Steve Sasson, who in 1975 produced the world's first digital camera as we recognize them today: a self-contained, comparatively hand-holdable device that captured images with a CCD sensor. Though, perhaps thankfully, the Compact Cassette tape didn't last long as a storage medium. Likewise it was a Kodak engineer, Bryce Bayer, who invented his eponymous, and now near ubiquitous color filter pattern, patented the same year. So perhaps it's not a surprise that it wa