interested in the subject area. We expanded the board then, so the board was
now the three cofounders; we had Randy Komisar as an outside director, and
we had representatives from Brentwood, Vulcan, and I think that was it. Maybe
we had one other guy.
Then we cranked. We introduced the product in July of 1996—one year
almost to the day after I got that first check from Marvin Davis to fund the company.
It had custom hardware, a browser from the ground up, proxy servers,
and so forth. The whole network was supported, and I was true to my word
when I called the guy at Pacific Bell and told him that we were going to be running
a nationwide online service.
Livingston: How did the idea for WebTV evolve? Was it to make the Web available
to people who might not have computers?
Perlman: Yes. I should go back even further. My mission, even before then, was
to connect average people together doing non-engineering things, the things
that interest them—to foster better communication, sharing of ideas, and for
pure entertainment. I love storytelling; my favorite college class remains “The
Novel.”
I wanted to figure out how to do communication. I wanted to figure out
consumer electronics. I wanted to figure out ease of use, you know, interfaces.
I wanted to work with televisions, audio systems. That’s what I’ve been interested
in, and it has driven all the things I’ve done.
When I joined Apple and interviewed with them, they weren’t even interested
in doing color, and we brought them over to doing color. We created the
whole color model as well as the rest of multimedia for the Mac—music and
sound and everything. We made the Macintosh from a little black and white
computer into a multimedia powerhouse. And it was driven really by what my
ultimate desire was: as a delivery vehicle for multimedia and a means by which
you can interact. Video games are one kind of interaction. That’s great, but
there is more than just that.
I think that, in the end, if you have enough people communicating with one
another, it’s going to be really hard to go and blow each other up. They may
send nasty messages on blogs, and they may argue and maybe somebody will
write something unpleasant in Wikipedia about you, but that’s a lot better than
blowing someone else up.
Livingston: Was it hard designing something for non-technical users?
Perlman: It’s extremely hard, because you have to design for someone who’s
not you. After a while, as you develop interfaces and have experience with
them, you begin to think with the intuition of a person who does not understand

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