Originally posted by boriscleto But only Pentax and Nikon maintained backward compatibility with their manual focus lenses.
Minolta merged with Konica (another company that abandoned the market rather than develop AF) before being sold to Sony, And Sony has abandoned SLRs...
You're right, of course. I tend to think of Sony and Minolta as more or less interchangeable, and forgot the current circumstances. But Minolta did offer a couple of DSLRs under their own name before Sony took over, so I think it's fair to say that they handled the change to DSLR without having to reinvent the wheel with their lenses.
Canon, of course, abandoned the older manual focus FD mount completely, with a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from many users at the time including me, in favour of EF. They did take a couple of stabs at AF on the FD mount, but the AF never worked well. But they did this early enough that by the time DSLRs came along the EF system already had a big user base which made the transition much easier, and the old lenses worked fine on digital bodies.