GoKawiilIt’s 1989. To play a video, listen to a song, or show photos on a desktop computer requires bolting on expensive hardware, built by a different company, using different software. There are no standards, no portability, no sharing.
Tyler Peppel, Apple product marketer: It should have been a natural area for Apple to be in, but we had nothing. Apple’s CEO John Sculley told me, “We need to get into this,” but of course, it wasn’t that easy.
John Worthington, audio engineer: There were people inside the company who said, “No one’s ever going to listen to music or watch videos on a computer. Ever.”
A dozen people at Apple changed that. They helped turn all kinds of computers into creative tools for millions of people.
It started with a tiny concept project within Apple’s secret Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Principal scientist Steve Perlman had completed work on a black-box device called QuickScan that made it possible to play a video on a Mac for the first time — it showed horses running from one side of the screen to the other, and people were stunned in a demo. But it required a separate, expensive chip to compress and decompress the video.
Steve Perlman, principal scientist: Apple did not allow disruptive products.
After QuickScan was cancelled, Perlman pursued a cheaper, software-only solution to multimedia with senior scientist Eric Hoffert. They thought maybe they could achieve their goals without needing any new gear at all.
Perlman: Almost everyone at Apple, and definitely everywhere else, assumed that multimedia would always require specialized hardware — and be expensive. A few of us thought otherwise.
This article has been adapted from John Buck’s book Inventing the Future: Bit by Bit, out now.
One of the few was Gavin Miller, a research scientist in Apple’s Graphics Group, who worked with Hoffert to crack the problem of software compression and decompression, otherwise known as codec.
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