Photography icon Eastman Kodak has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

And the amazing thing is that they invented the digital camera. My first digital camera was a Kodak.

I worked for kodak for over 27 years until a layoff in '99 and am surprised they have hung on this long with the inept upper management in that company

When digital came along, and yes, kodak researchers did invent it, the "great minds" that ran the company kept tell us that it was a fad and "real" photography was still going to be film. Those of us that worked on the manufacturing floor were all saving up to buy a digital camera because we could see where technology was headed.

The only digital camera they made at the time my fellow employees and I were canned was one aimed at the professional news paper photographer and cost $20,000.

Here's a link to a history of digital photography from a man who worked in the part of kodak responsible for research into that area.

steveoutdoorrec,

I bought a Kodak DCS 420 in 1996 (might have been '97... can't remember) 1.2 Mpx $8500. It was a Nikon N90 with a digital back on it. Used a 300 MB PCMCIA hard drive for storage. It was fun to be an early adopter, but very pricey.

Hi Calvin,

Long time no see... I hope you are well!

FYI- I have personal experience with the syndrome that killed Kodak. The people inside Kodak who were riding the wave of chemical photography thwarted the efforts of their own in-house digital entrepreneurs because they feared competition for their personal corporate kingdoms. There actions brought about their own demise. Something very similar happened in the CAD software business... I created one of the first PC based CAD apps, then struck a deal with Computervision, the largest CAD company in world at the time, to market it. CV died of the same illness that killed Kodak... they were subsequently gobbled up by Prime who was in turn consumed by PTC. Long story... maybe I'll write about it some time.

Cheers,
Mal

MalamuteMan: I might have painted that body you bought. I painted parts for just about everything kodak made in Rochester. Some of the models were for Nikon backs and others for Cannon.

It was a great place to work if you ignored how often upper management messed up. One of my supervisors explained it to me. He said that in the management meetings everyone would say variations of "we have a few problems with our processes but are working them out."
What they should have said is that the designers never checked with the people who actually had to build the products to see if there was a process that could do what they imagined and so the product will never come in at cost or on time or actually work as intended.
One new plant manager told us all in a big meeting that moral was high and he expected production to sky rocket. One of my coworkers on the graveyard shift emailed him (at a time when very few people had access to email) to let him know that on the floor moral was at an all time low from badly handled layoffs and restructuring.
His reply was that my coworker didn't know what he was talking about because the manger's underlings had told him the truth. We invited him to come in on the graveyard shift and we'd tell him the real truth with examples.
Never happened. So I'm not surprise they are a dying company.