Our film is out of date

Sippican Cottage:

I have almost no pictures of my work from back then. I tell my children that you used to have to buy a reel of plastic film covered with metallic goo and keep it hermetically sealed in an expensive camera, and when you were done with 24 pictures or so, you'd take them out and drive to a store and leave them with a clerk and then go back a week later after they were done drizzling them with strange chemicals and printing them on shiny pieces of paper. They were all completely white or completely black, generally, when you finally got a look at them.

I tell them, but they figure I'm pulling their leg.

Who invented the personal computer?

Xerox Alto, with mouse and Rolodex, early seventies.

Who came up with the first personal computer?  The first graphic interface?  The first computer mouse?  The first ethernet network?  Was it Steve Jobs?  Bill Gates?  A team of  faceless Japanese engineers?  No, it was formerly Rochester, NY based Xerox Corporation.

In the sixties and seventies Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Company (PARC) invented just about everything you can imagine. That includes what was recognized as the first true PC – The Xerox Alto… This sucker had everything, Ethernet networking, graphical user interface, icons, bit mapping, scalable type, a mouse, the world’s first laser printer, hot and cold running water, a back scratcher (OK, just kidding on the last two.)

So why didn't we ever see Altos in every business, school, house, tent and mud hut aound the globe, like the more successful "micro computers?" we've come to know and love?  George Parker explains:

It was years ahead of its time. So what did Xerox management do with it? Not a god damn thing. They were too busy counting the money rolling in every time someone used a 914, ‘cos you couldn’t buy one, you had to lease it and pay for every copy you made. The thing was a gold mine for years until the patents finally ran out.

As everyone knows, the main beneficiary of all the incredible stuff coming out of PARC was Steve Jobs, ‘cos in its infinite wisdom, Xerox gave the King of Apple a conducted tour of PARC, showing him everything they were up to, even watching him as he made notes of everything he was shown. Within months he had hired away some of PARCS top talent and instituted a program that resulted in the Lisa, the forerunner of the Mac, which I worked on before most of you were born!

The "914" was an early Xerox office copy machine, which generated so much revenue that Xerox saw no reason to exploit its later invention.  Why, that sounds just like that another Rochester industrial giant, now bankrupt, which invented digital photography - Eastman Kodak.

Kodak selling online services to Shutterfly

Rochester's bankrupt Eastman Kodak Company is reported to be in the process of selling is online photo services business, Kodak Gallery, to competitor Shutterfly.

Eastman Kodak Co has agreed to sell its online photo services business to Shutterfly Inc for $23.8 million, kicking off the bankrupt photography pioneer's relaunch as a much slimmer company although a patent sale seen crucial to its turnaround may still be months away.

The once-iconic company that invented the hand-held camera has said it will quit the camera business and is expected to fetch $1 billion to $2 billion from the sale of about 1,100 digital patents, which is due to get under way by June 30.

After dominating Upstate's industrial landscape for more that 100 years, Eastman is now forced to surrender it's still-viable photo printing business to what was, only a few years ago, a tiny start-up that no one at Kodak Park had ever heard of.  While Kodak management was out spending their annual bonuses on Buicks and swimming pools, a few techies in California were thinking ahead.

Shutterfly was founded in 1999 by two employees of Silicon Graphics – Eva Manolis and Dan Baum. Eva was a product person and Dan was a technology person. They teamed up and asked Jim Clark to fund it, which he did...

The vision at the time was that people were starting to buy these new things called digital cameras, but their pictures were stuck in them. They created a site that allowed people to get their pictures out of the camera, literally. Their early adopters where white men, technofiles, spending $2,000 for a 1-2 Mega Pixel camera. That was in 1999. They started programming in April, and the site launched on December 11, 1999.

 More on Kodak's digital photography history here.

Kodak makes its last camera

Rochester's Eastman Kodak Company introduced its first daylight loading camera in 1891.  Today, Upstate New York's former industrial giant, now bankrupt, announced that it will end camera production.

For generations of New York politicians and business "leaders," who've told us the solution to our economic collapse is more of the same, then more of the same, then even billions more of the same, we'd hope Kodak's historic collapse will ring a bell.  At least, take Kodak's name off the list of  politically connected crony corporations we're supposed to follow into the promised land.

Opie gets a Kodak

New York "recovery" "stalling"

Future flea market location?

Finger Lakes residents may not have noticed that New York's economy has been recovering.  In a press release provided to Gannett, Andy Cuomo's official spokesman for economic matters admits that it really isn't.

New York's economic recovery appears to be losing momentum, and that's raising concerns about the pace of the rebound we'll see in 2012.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli shared those findings in a report released Thursday: "Economic Trends in New York State."

 Don't move to Texas yet, as DiNapoli has some good news.

Rochester, New York City and the Glens Falls areas did better than the state average, with Rochester recovering 98.1 percent of the jobs it lost. The report attributed Rochester's economic success to gains in professional and business services, but it warned that the recent bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak "could result in the loss of thousands of jobs."

Yeah, that Kodak bankruptcy could really have a negative impact on Upstate's staggering economy, Tom.  Then there's this other matter:

New York also has had the stigma of being unfriendly to business. The Tax Foundation, based in Washington D.C., last week named New York as having the 49th worst business climate in the nation -- ahead only of New Jersey.

"The combination of high property taxes, high income taxes, high corporate-income taxes and high sales taxes all create a toxic climate for attracting businesses and people in the state and keeping businesses and people in the state," said Scott Hodge, the group's president.

Kodak introduces digital photography..

The future was in their hands

...in 1995.  In this photo, Kodak staffers demonstrate digital photography at a press conference in San Francisco on March 28 of that year.  The basic technology behind digital photography was developed at Kodak in 1975.

Kodak had a fast break opportunity with digital imaging, but threw the ball away. Check out the rise and fall of the Big Yellow Box at ExtremeTech.

Kodak: world's first digital SLR, 1991

Kodak bankrupt

Eastman Kodak Company has finally pulled the trigger.

"After considering the advantages of Chapter 11 at this time, the board of directors and the entire senior management team unanimously believe that this is a necessary step and the right thing to do for the future of Kodak," CEO Antonio M. Perez said in announcing the decision.

The filing listed assets of $5.1 billion and debts of $6.75 billion...

As of a year ago, Kodak had 7,100 employees in the Rochester area and 18,800 companywide. The worldwide figure is now 17,000, the company said in its bankruptcy papers, about 8,000 of them in the U.S. It did not give a new Rochester-area figure.

At its peak in the early 1980s, the company employed 62,000 people in Rochester and 130,000 worldwide.

Under Perez's enlightened stewardship, Kodak's stock price dropped from $25/share to bupkes.  One would assume Mr. Perez had his hands full getting ready for a big garage sale at Kodak Park, but the Spanish-born business genius still has enough free time to serve on something called "President Barack Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness."

Kodak's last new cameras?

Despite teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, Rochester's Eastman Kodak Company introduced two new cameras today - perhaps its last.

Two new Kodak cameras were announced today, both of which are priced below the $200 mark: the Wi-Fi-enabled Kodak EasyShare M750, which allows users to upload photos directly from the camera and pair up with smartphones via a peer-to-peer connection, and the Playfull Dual hybrid still/video camera, which has some of the best specs we've seen in a pocket camcorder.

Kodak shares drop to 48 cents

As Kodak board members abandon ship, renewed bankruptcy rumors sent shares of Rochester's once-mighty Eastman Kodak Company to a new low today.

Shares in photography company Eastman Kodak have tumbled to a new all-time low following a report that the ailing company is getting ready to seek bankruptcy court protection.

The Wall Street Journal said Kodak is preparing for a bankruptcy 11 filing "in the coming weeks" should efforts to sell a trove of digital-imaging patents fall through.

Among the well paid geniuses who ran Kodak into the ground, and the most recent fleeing board member, elite academic Laura D'Andrea Tyson was head of Bill & Hillary Clinton's National Economic Council and 16th Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.  Amazingly, the teflon Tyson is now on deck for a similar position in the Obama administration.

Professor Tyson

Last exit for the "Big Yellow Box?"

Rochester's Eastman Kodak may be all done, folks.

Eastman Kodak Co. (EK), the unprofitable 131-year-old camera maker, is weighing options including a bankruptcy filing because of concerns raised by possible buyers of its patent portfolio, said three people with direct knowledge of the process.

Sam Henry looks at a sad day for Rochester, Upstate New York, and everyone who ever captured images on film.

This is a company whose “campus”once  covered a large portion of this city and whose wealth enabled Rochester to print its own money or script during the Great Depression and to carry on fairly unscathed.  So many in the community were touched by Kodak that you heard it said “the big yellow box takes care of us.”  And it did.