because that’s when...
because that’s when stores would open: Jameco Electronics would open at 9:00
a.m. in California, which is noon in Connecticut. So what’s the point of getting
up before noon, right?
I’ve always been a hobbyist, and it’s one of the reasons I kind of seamlessly
go between software, hardware, networking, and material science. I don’t
care—it’s whatever it takes to make the damn thing work. I don’t have much
formal education in these things, but you learn. You build enough stuff; after a
while, you see it. And if you reverse-engineer enough things, you learn what
other people have done.
I designed a software-based modem when I was in college and I got an F for
it because the professor said it would never work. But I got it working at my
first company. The professor was quite nice about it. I sent him an email later
on and said, “This email is being sent to you on the modem that I designed at
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
| ← and I didn’t | on a television → |