We Had No Idea (the first digital camera)

Film business - dead from Digital Cameras - time taken ~7 years from first affordable high quality cameras. Music Distribution business (cds/vinyls in shops) - death throes from Digital Music players - time taken ~7 years from first affordable high quality mp3 players. Newspaper business - first models of viable media devices (Kindle, iPad) now viable - gone by 2015?

I wonder if these guys would have gotten funding in today's corporate world, showing off that clunky device! It seems like this is a good example of the kind of leap that management needs to be able to take to see the potential of research work. We've all been so habituated to expecting "the world of tomorrow, today" that now researchers have to get a lot closer to productization (especially with respect to aesthetics) for higher-ups to "get it".

It seems kind of pointless to take a patent on something even /you/ think will only become big in 15-20 years...

It's an interesting achievement, but as far as I understand, all technologies demonstrated in this prototype were already used on satellites by this time.

if you look at many inventions we use today...they were actually invented decades before they started getting used by consumers.