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...

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
...

value of it was, but he nonetheless committed to put some seed funding in. We
ended up raising $1.5 million from Marvin, and that’s what we started the company
with.
That was in July of 1995. I think I got the thing working first in April 1995,
so from April to July, I kind of pulled together the business plan and at least the
first couple of guys that were going to help me, spent a lot of time calling different
people who we might be able to work with, went looking for office...

what I’ve always done for my vocation.
I called Sony and said, “Hey, we should go and do this cool thing.” Sony was
interested—I networked through some of the contacts I had made at General
Magic, but they were slow getting through the company. We also began to
speak with Philips. Sony finally said they wanted to go forward with WebTV, but
they’d have to be exclusive for a year. They’d brand WebTV with a Sony logo,
and they’d distribute it through their stores, and so on. But we could begin to
have...

along the road with that made a processor. When it came down to literally days
before we signed the investment document, they added in a section that said
we would be obliged to use only them as the provider for all of our silicon. In
other words, they set it up so that our backs were against the wall, and they
were getting us locked in. We knew that, if we were locked into one provider
for silicon, we would have no way to negotiate prices. That would drive up the
cost of the...