Steven Sasson has every right to be mad. Back in the day, his invention could have changed the fate of the Eastman Kodak Company and revolutionized the world of photography--but for the blindness of Kodak’s executives.

In 1975, Steven Sasson, then an employee of the Eastman Kodak Company, developed the forerunner of the digital camera. But instead of embracing the idea, Kodak executives hushed it up, fearing it would kill Kodak’s golden goose: Film rolls.

Today it’s easy, if unfair, to paint all of Kodak’s leadership with the same grey brush of innovation-blindness. At the height of its success, the company was seen as today’s equivalent of Apple. It had 145,000 workers and was the industry leader with the most innovative ideas. It had, for instance, developed a simple low-priced camera, the Kodak Brownie, which introduced millions to photography. And it did that to sell the film which was the mainstay of its business.

It was in the tradition of that innovation, that it had tasked a young engineer named Steven Sasson to create a camera that didn’t need film. The result of that project was the world’s first digital camera. It used a CCD (charge-coupled device) for image capture and cassette tape for storage. The camera weighed 3.7 kg and was the size of a small briefcase.

But when Sasson and his colleagues unveiled what they called ‘film-less photography’ to Kodak's bosses in 1975, they were met with blank stares. “It is funny now to look back on the project and realize that we were not really thinking of this as the world's first digital camera," Sasson later wrote on company blog.

 To Kodak’s executives, the idea of ‘film-less photography’ was harakiri. Kodak’s Kodachrome was the defacto standard for photographers across the world, and that’s how Kodak wanted it to stay.

In the 1990’s, the company missed the digital-camera boat again. Kodak burnt billions developing technology for mobile phones cameras and other digital devices. But, once again, it never took the initiative mass market.

Now that Kodak’s filed for bankruptcy, what’s in the future for the company? It’s hard to say. Although, Kodak’s core film business is dead, it can still bank on the fortune it has amassed over the years in innovative R&D and its thousands of patents on imaging technology. The technology behind some of these patents, for instance, is still in widespread use in the cameras in mobile phones.

It will be another ironic twist to the Kodak saga, if the company that brought the world its first view of the moon, that was synonymous with photography for three generations of amateur and professional photographers, is only remembered as a case study for a innovation blindness.