Just before the dawn of disco and the first Star Wars movie, the digital camera first saw the light of day. But this 1975 blunderbuss wasn’t anything like today’s palm-sized baubles, no sir.

This clunker from Kodak was the size of at least a hundred of today’s digi-cams, recording its murky 100-line black-and-white images onto a cassette tape. No rapid-fire 1200 frames-per-second shooting and quick transfer to flash memory here — it took a full 23 seconds to record one of those crude images onto the tape.

You know those tiny and easy-to-lose batteries inside your camera? Imagine 16 bulky nickel-cadmium cells providing power for your digi-snaps. What if you wanted to view those images? Take a gander at the ancient playback device, after the jump:

The next step in this cumbersome process was hooking up that cassette player to this clunky computer that would somehow play the pic back onto a television set. Looks like Kodak has learned a lot about ease of use since those early days.

Via Retro Thing