The company have been trailblazers in a lot of ways, with their iPod paving the way for MP3 players to be commonly used over CD Walkmans and the like. But many of their biggest breakthroughs have been forgotten, lost to the sands of time: they produced some of the early office printers, scanners, and then there's the Newton now mostly remembered for that one Simpsons joke no young person understands. Amongst all that, though, there's on piece of tech that was genuinely pioneering, is widely used today, and which Apple doesn't get nearly enough credit for. The company produced the first commercially-available digital camera all the way back in 1994, a good decade or so before people started taking them up in favour of traditional film cameras. The Quicktake was manufactured and sold between 1994 and 1997. Made in collaboration with photography kings Kodak, the camera had a fixed lens (so no zooming) and could store up to eight VGA-resolution images at a time. Which is perhaps why it didn't catch on, people preferring the high-resolution photos and of a larger quantity they could still capture on a traditional reel of film.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
