Daring Fireball: John Buck on the Invention of QuickTime

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, …

John Scully was the CEO of Apple at the time. Although he was much maligned by Steve Jobs and others for some of his decisions, he did have a positive lasting impact on Apple.

This also reminded me of the wonderful Kon & Bal column in Apple Develop around that time.