"First" digital camera

From: John Lawson <jpl15_at_panix.com>
Date: Sat May 29 10:47:30 2004

  A little OT but certainly related: I had a 'camera' made by MicroMint
(Steve Ciarcia) made to work with an Apple ][. It was basically a
photo-eraseable EPROM and an adapter card for the Apple.

  The EEPROM was mounted in the back of a closed aluminum tube with a lens
threaded into the front, with one of those cheap table-top tripods. The
software wrote all 1s to the EPROM and then the light from the object
being photgraphed erased whatever bitcells it impinged on.

  The software on the Apple then collected these bits, dithered them, and
presented them as pixels on the display. At that point you could also
print the image on a dot-matrix printer.

 Hand Franke has it now - I still have a couple of JPEGs I took of it if
anyone's interested. It was from '78 or thereabouts.


  Cheers

John
Received on Sat May 29 2004 - 10:47:30 BST