Founders at Work.pdf

178 Founders at Work
The other thing—and this is an interesting point—back in the 1980s, when
I developed this technology for Apple, software patents were not things that
people filed. It was mainly hardware patents. Later on, people started filing
software patents. The reason is software was considered an algorithm, and an
algorithm is not patentable. A Fourier transform is not patentable. It’s considered
a mathematical function. This technique for stabilizing the image—the
basic underlying principles of it—were things that patent attorneys said we
couldn’t file patents on, so it was open for anyone to use.
But still, the way I did it at Apple wasn’t enough for what we needed to do
with the Web. We had other things to accomplish, and so what I did was take
those basic ideas and added on a whole bunch of other stuff and filed some
basic patents around it. I knew that it was possible to take an image intended
for a computer screen and get it to work on a television. So I went to Fry’s and
got about $3,000 worth of parts and built something over 3 days and 2 nights.
(Much like I was working at Catapult. Back then, that’s the way we worked.) I
then got this image up of these web pages on a TV, and it looked perfect. It
looked just like the image looked on the computer screen. I grant you, back
then, computer screens were largely 640✕480 and web pages were a little bit
smaller and so on, so it did happen to work for the time and place we were in.
I called my friend Bruce Leak, who I mentioned before is the guy I worked
with at Apple. He had taken a lot of the technology that we had developed in
the Advanced Technology Group, like QuickTime and also the color
QuickDraw stuff, and then developed these technologies into products. We had
a good partnership working together. He was at another startup at the time,
Rocket Science Games. It was the middle of the night—it was midnight or
something—I called him up on his cell and said, “Bruce, get your ass over
here.” He said, “Why?” And I said, “I’ve got something to show you. I’m about
to pass out.”
So he comes over and looks at it and says, “Well, so what? What did you do
to the TV set?” And I said, “I didn’t do anything to the TV set. It’s what I did to
the signal going into the TV.” And he’s like, “No way!” And I said, “Yeah!”
I remember he said, “Man, we’ve got to form a company.” And I said, “Ah,
yeah.” I think that was the first moment I even thought about it. Then I was
thinking we should get a good name for the company, and immediately we
knew it was going to be called WebTV.
After that, one thing kind of led to another. We were able to attract Phil
Goldman to come, another top-notch developer. He created MultiFinder for
Mac, and he wrote a lot of the OS for the General Magic device.
Then we went to Marvin Davis, a wealthy financier in Hollywood. He had
made a lot of money because he invested early in Catapult. As I said, Catapult
was financially successful although it was not successful as a product. He told
me that, whatever I did next, he wanted to put money into it—because he had
turned around his Catapult shares and sold them to Viacom and made some
outrageous profit in about half a year. So I went down to Hollywood with Bruce
to meet with Marvin Davis, and we demonstrated WebTV to him—the prototype
I had—on a TV set in his office. I’m not sure he immediately saw what the