He is a born entrepreneur, an unrepentant creator of the technology industry with more than 40 years of innovation. The thing with Steve Perlman is crazy and Applefera owed him an article because we are talking about one of the most brilliant minds of his generation, although he lived in the shadow of others.
For example, three facts: In 1976, while still in high school, he built his first computer from a kit. The following year, he was already programming video games. In 1983, Atari signed him, and the following year, he was raffled off to Coleco, where he developed a 3D animation chip and a high-speed software modem. By 1985 he was already Apple’s chief scientist.where he led the development of various multimedia technologies, such as QuickTime. And that was just the beginning.
And Steve Perlman is one of those innovators who, while perhaps not as well known as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, has left an indelible mark on his people.
Who is Steve Perlman?
Steve Perlman was born in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1961. By age 10, he was attending Talcott Mountain Mathematics and Science Academy in Avon, Connecticut. Perlman graduated from Hall High School in West Hartford in 1979. He then went on to study humanities at Columbia University, where he hacked the computer network in true Mark Zuckerberg style, but skipped school to work on a minicomputer project for Northeast Utilities, the largest utility company in New England (Connecticut). Ten years later, he was already one of the most prestigious data scientists in Silicon Valley.
Its unicorns include General Magic, Catapult Entertainment, WebTV —which ended up being sold to Microsoft for over $450 million— and Moxi Digital and Rearden — inspired by Rearden Steel from the novel “Atlas Shrugged” by novelist Ayn Rand —. He is today one of the leaders in AI and understands nothing else than taking risks, solving problems and innovating, reinventing himself and exploring where his ideas take him. But it is better to take it one step at a time.
The Birth of QuickTime
It’s Christmas 1984. In the 1980s, video playback on computers was difficult due to hardware limitations and the lack of effective compression standards. Perlman has just written QuickScan, the first native program that plays video on a Mac. Everything seems to go smoothly, but its distribution is canceled – after a few public demos – because it requires its own graphics chip to work. However, the idea is not dismissed: in his second Worldwide Developers Conference, May 1991, Apple introduces QuickTime 1.0It will not reach users until December 1991.
And yes, it was something to be proud of. It was not an application, but a complete suite for editing, compressing, playing and manipulating video files. Unsurprisingly, the first QuickTime video shown to the public was Apple’s iconic “1984” ad. The great virtue of this application lies in its precision model capable of analyzing resource consumption. If your Mac was too slow, Quicktime consumed the necessary resources, cropped the frames (unlike today, which are added by interpolation to create a smoother feel) and made you watch the movie as best as possible according to your equipment.
Every computer Apple ships with still has QuickTime installed, thirty years later. They’re all compatible. And the QuickTime codec not only transformed the way people interact with media, it also set an industry standard, paving the way for future innovations in digital video playback.
Turn to WebTV: Bringing the Internet to TV
Following his success at Apple, Perlman decided to explore new opportunities and joined a small group of visionaries to found WebTV in 1995. The idea behind WebTV was simple: bring the Internet to the television screen. In 1996, 92% of the world’s population had never used the Internet..
Steve Perlman was clear: One night, Perlman was surfing the Internet and came across the Campbell’s soup website. He thought people might be interested in something the Web didn’t offer. “I’ve worked my whole life to create interactive television. I always knew it was a way to bring computers closer to ordinary people,” he said in an interview with PC Magazine a decade later.
And that was his first taste of connected TV. It was expensive, of course: It launched on September 18, 1996, for $330 plus a $19.95 monthly service fee for unlimited email and “Web browsing.” For $50 more, you could get a wireless keyboard and browse from the couch. It didn’t take off, but it immediately caught the attention of Microsoft. Bill Gates’s people helped him create a WebTV 2.0 that generated a slight uptick in sales: nearly a million subscribers by mid-1999.
Microsoft Acquires WebTV: From Pioneer to Tycoon
For about $425 million, which today would easily be a billion-dollar purchase, Microsoft pocketed the project. In 2001, Microsoft renamed WebTV MSN TV. The project languished and changes were proposed within Microsoft’s management. At that time, ideas were already in development, such as trying to buy Nintendo, creating the Xbox.
Then came MSN TV 2, with high-speed Internet and many improvements such as purchasing the service – even music, with an emphasis on polytones and imitating a certain Apple model. The service died in 2013, but in reality it had been a corpse for nearly a decade.. Microsoft actually had to spend its money on another idea called Microsoft. And with it was born Perlman’s entrepreneurial and innovative spirit, even though he felt his true passion was creating and developing new technologies from scratch.
New Frontiers: The Birth of OnLive and Other Projects
After leaving Microsoft, Perlman founded Rearden SARLan innovation lab dedicated to developing cutting-edge technologies. One of Rearden’s most ambitious projects was OnLive, a cloud platform that allowed people to check email, send content, chat on Discord, and best of all, play video games in HD without the need for consoles or powerful computers.
OnLive was launched in 2010 and, while it hasn’t been a massive commercial success, it is a success. precursor to the video game streaming services we see today like GeForce Now or the now defunct Google Stadia. In addition to OnLive, Perlman has also been involved in the development of several other innovative technologies, including Mova, an advanced motion capture technology widely used in the film industry that led to a lengthy legal dispute because they would not acknowledge his contributions. A war that ended only two months ago, with an undisclosed settlement. At least with Paramount, since the lawsuits against Disney/Fox are still ongoing.
Anyway, another one major He took out his wallet and had the idea: in 2015, Sony paid $380 million and took over the technology and 140 valuable patents This would serve to make PlayStation Now a truly competitive service.
pCell: Revolutionizing telecommunications
Now let’s think that we’ve already lived a successful life, that we’re a communications mogul, and that we have a guarantee and a portfolio that would allow us to retire for good. Well, that kind of thing didn’t sit well with Steve Perlman. In 2011, he founded Artemis Networks, a company dedicated to the development of advanced wireless communications technologies..
And in this context pCell (Personal Cell) was born, a technology that promised to revolutionize the way mobile data is transmitted. Unlike traditional cellular networks that divide the frequency spectrum between users, pCell uses constructive interference to create a personal “cell” for each device, allowing all users to access the entire available spectrum simultaneously.
Said in Christian: each terminal has its own cell and the bandwidth does not have to be distributed among nearby users, but each benefits from all the available bandwidth, to be able to increase the capacity of mobile networks by 50. And it does it with Nokia.
In his first live presentation, Perlman showed how eight iPhones streamed high-definition video sharing just 5 MHz of spectrum. Their project, a decade in the making, demonstrated that it was possible to stream a series in 4K quality (specifically Netflix’s “House of Cards”) using just 10 MHz of spectrum. Yes, Netflix took advantage of that.
According to him, this technology could also transmit energy, and not just data, which would have applications in inductive charging systems or the possibility of doing without batteries. Well, just look at what he achieves in a crowded Times Square: Artemis pCell vRAN outperforms current 5G networks by 10x. It’s 6G before 6G. But we’d better stop there, waiting for their next innovation. Perlman has left an indelible mark on the tech world, both as an inventor and an entrepreneur. And it’s a pleasure to know that Apple was his first home.
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