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.
Steve Perlman 177
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

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