Just read a take that “30 years ago we’d have to wait days for pictures of the Aurora”.
I think this is a case of “mysterious old technology mythical tales”.
First of all, digital cameras or the ability to convert analog video to digital stills existed, widely, since the 1980s. For consumers digital cameras were available in 1994.
For film, the fact is that in the 80s/90s there were 1-hour photo places literally everywhere.
Newspapers had photos of current events since the 19th century.
