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Twenty years ago, inside a maternity ward at Sutter Maternity Center in Santa Cruz, California, Philippe Kahn’s Toshiba laptop computer sat on a desk alongside a C-section operating table where his wife was going to deliver their baby. Kahn, a French software engineer, also had a Motorola flip phone and a Casio digital camera stacked in his bag. He was nervous as he hadn’t been able to build the prototype he desired. He couldn’t find a way to connect the three things: camera, laptop, and web server. But while his wife, Sonia Lee, spent 18 hours in labor, she gave him an idea. The idea changed the photographic scene of the world forever. That day, on June 11, 1997, Kahn witnessed two births – one of his daughter Sophie and the other of the “world’s first camera phone,” a revolutionary beginning of instant photography, reported IEEE Spectrum.

Kahn had been working on his web-based photo technology for over a year. He called this technology by the name “Picture Mail.” The concept of Picture Mail was akin to what is today known as “sharing.” Users who wanted to share a picture and text with their friends and family were required to upload the picture on this web-based server. After the picture is uploaded, the server automatically creates a link to it on the web and sends it to all the people in the list through email alerts. The technology worked like a digital update system, quite similar to the social media notifications people receive today on platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook.