Photos: The history of the digital camera

The coming of true digital
The first true digital camera that actually worked was built in 1981. The University of Calgary Canada ASI Science Team built the Fairchild All-Sky camera to photograph auroras, an example of which is shown on the right of our picture.

The All-Sky Camera utilised more of those 100x100-pixel Fairchild CCDs, which had been around since 1973. What made the All-Sky Camera truly digital was that it recorded digital data rather than analogue. In October 1981 the digital revolution rolled on with the release of the world's first consumer compact disk player, the Sony CDP-101.