I'm trying to date when we were first playing with this, but that was a messy period in my life and it is hard to put it all in chronological order. But I do know I had a driving license so it must have been around 87 or 88. The thing that I remember most clearly is that the images we made had a massive blank area where the chip was split into two halves with a bunch of stuff in the middle.
Micron made one in the early eighties also and Steve Ciarcia promptly produced a DIY version for Byte.
I'm pretty sure Steve's article is where we got the idea. We used a 4164 and an old camera lens.
I’m curious whether this is truly the first, or whether classified aerospace projects had quietly developed digital imaging devices for reco a decade earlier.
I would guess that it's maybe not, because I've never heard of any IC DRAM before the commercially available Intel DRAM.
Other types of imaging devices, sure. But the trick of decapping a DRAM requires a DRAM chip.