Founders at Work.pdf

Steve Perlman 177
Columbia.” And he said, “We try to make the right judgments and we don’t
always. I’m glad that I did not dissuade you from continuing on with its development.”
I thought that was a very nice thing to say.
Livingston: So you leave Catapult and say, “I’m just going to tinker around and
see what happens?”
Perlman: Netscape 1.0 comes out. I get it working, and I said, “Wow, this is
really great,” because people are putting up websites that anybody can go to. I
went to campbellsoup.com, and there was a Campbell’s soup can and recipes. It
was the early days of the Web, so there wasn’t too much, but I thought, “The
kind of people that would be interested in these recipes probably aren’t using
computers and connecting to the Web.”
Remember, this is before a lot of people got computers in order to get email
and be on the Web. And then I thought, “This could be the thing I need to
break that chicken-and-egg problem.” Because if I can get these pages that
were really designed for PC screens to work on a television screen, then . . . It’s
not ideal content; a lot of it is stuff really suited for someone on a PC. But some
of it, like this Campbell’s soup site—and there were many other sites, music
sites and all that—is suited for the casual television entertainment experience.
That might be enough to bootstrap us so we could do what I really want to do,
which is these richer—what we now call broadband—interactive experiences.
Things like DVR and so forth.
Before Apple, I was at Atari and Coleco. I designed video game systems
there, and I knew an awful lot about how to create a very high-resolution image
on a television screen by doing special image processing. If you try to put a
high-resolution image on a TV screen, it’s interlaced. Interlaced means it draws
all the odd lines in 1/60th of an second, and then it draws all the even lines. If
you have a continuous-tone image—the kind of image you see in the real
world—and you capture it with a video camera, your eye, even though the
whole screen is only refreshed 30 times a second, will look at each of these individual
fields, all the odd lines and all the even lines refreshed at 1/60th of a second,
and think it’s flashing 60 times a second. At 60 times a second, if you stand
back in the room, it’s your foveal vision; it seems like a non-flickering image. So
you look at a TV, and it doesn’t seem to flicker.
But, if you now put content in one of those fields and then very different
content in the other fields—for example, take black-and-white horizontal lines
as you might see at the top of an old Macintosh window, and you put that on a
TV screen, it flashes like crazy. In fact, it can put an epileptic into a seizure; it’s
that bad. So what they would do before is only have the TV draw half the lines
vertically. All the video games back then, instead of having 480 lines, they would
only draw 240 lines. I had figured out techniques where I could do image processing
on images that would be intended for a computer where they would be
smoothed out in such a way that you would not see them flicker. They would
look extremely sharp on the TV, but they would not flash, so you could now do
a high-resolution image on a TV. The technology was in some of the
Macintoshes, but not many people were hooking up Macs to TVs.