The "Big Bird" story

The Big Bird system. source: wikipedia

Sometimes we take everything for granted and we forget that not a long time ago, there was no computer or digital camera to take high-resolution photos from Earth. United States government gave a task to a group of engineers at the height of the Cold War, to build a camera that can take high-resolution photographs of the Earth and return them to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Remember, there was no computer or a single kilobyte of network bandwidth available at that time. It was October 1966 and the new development of the new satellite system, Hexagon, was underway. This project, also known as "Big Bird", was a follow-on to very successful Corona satellite program and a complement to the higher-resolution Gambit satellite.

The following video shows the amazing story of how US supersecret, Cold-War spy satellites took photos of the Soviet empire and dropped them to Earth, all without the help of computers, bandwidth, or digital cameras.

read more at the Atlantic.