The state of the art in visible spectrum solid -state area arrays is discussed from an historical perspective. The major development during the decade of the 1960's was the first demonstration of self-scanned solid -state area imagers using transistors as photosensors. During the decade of the 1970's, major advances included the charge-coupled concept, temporal and spatial noise reduction and the understanding of aliasing vs. MTF. During the 1980's, solid -state imaging has continued to mature with advances in the control of defects, development of color filters for one -chip color camera, development of vertical anti -blooming and anti -smear structures and the use of thin films for vertical photosites.