Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Source: OpenAI bought TBPN, which was set to generate $30M in 2026, for "low hundreds of millions of dollars"; OpenAI says TBPN will be editorially independent (George Hammond/Financial Times)
George Hammond / Financial Times:
Source: OpenAI bought TBPN, which was set to generate $30M in 2026, for “low hundreds of millions of dollars”; OpenAI says TBPN will be editorially independent — ChatGPT-maker moves into broadcasting with deal for TBPN after it had pledged to abandon ‘side-quests’
John Buck on the Invention of QuickTime
John Buck at The Verge (gift link), excerpted from his great book, Inventing the Future:
Steve Perlman: Almost everyone at Apple, and definitely everywhere else, assumed that multimedia would always require specialized hardware — and be expensive. A few of us thought otherwise.
One of the few was Gavin Miller, a research scientist in Apple’s Graphics Group, who worked with Hoffert to crack the problem of software compression and decompression, otherwise known as codec.
Gavin Miller, research scientist: We went for a lunchtime walk, and by the end of it, we had generalized the model to include constant color blocks and 2-bit per-pixel interpolating blocks. This allowed us to trade off quantization artifacts in large flat areas for more detail in textured areas. The result was an increase in quality and performance that helped to make the codec practical for really small video sizes.
Just a typical lunchtime walk-and-talk.
Fun anecdote from 1990:
He asked Peppel to create a product plan that he could announce at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on May 7th. That day, Casey took to the stage and announced QuickTime to a stunned audience, saying, “Apple intends to develop real-time software compression/decompression technology that will run on today’s modular Macintosh systems. A system-wide time coding to allow synchronization of sound, animation, and other time-critical processes.”
Casey explained that Apple’s new multimedia architecture would be delivered by the end of the year. He did not say that QuickTime had no budget, staff, or offices.
Worthington: We were dumbfounded.
Konstantin Othmer, QuickDraw engineer: I was standing next to Bruce Leak, and asked him, “What the heck was that?” He said he had no idea.
QuickTime actually shipped by WWDC 1991, teaching Apple the important lesson that anything they announce at WWDC, no matter how premature, will ship as promised.