fascinatingly, this is incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sasson

KODAK basically invented digital photography, in 1975!!

But timing is everything. They should have circled back to it in the 00s, when consumer tech had caught up, making the whole thing practical. No one in 75 had an 8 bit desktop to process digital photos with, B&W dot matrix printers (in addition to being NOISY AS ALL FUCK) wouldn’t really give you much of an output to hang on the wall… so yeah, Kodak invented digital photography, but the inertia of traditional silver-film based photography with chemical processing required too much decisiveness for (at that time) a company resting on it’s existing successes.