It’s 1989. To play a video, listen to a song, or show photos on a desktop computer requires bolting on expensive hardware, built by a different company, using different software. There are no standards, no portability, no sharing.
Tyler Peppel, Apple product marketer: It should have been a natural area for Apple to be in, but we had nothing. Apple’s CEO John Sculley told me, “We need to get into this,” but of course, it wasn’t that easy.
John Worthington, audio engineer: There were people inside the company who said, “No one’s ever going to listen to music or watch videos on a computer. Ever.”
A dozen people at Apple changed that. They helped turn all kinds of computers into creative tools for millions of people.
It started with a tiny concept project within Apple’s secret Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Principal scientist Steve Perlman had completed work on a black-box device called QuickScan that made it possible to play a video on a Mac for the first time — it showed horses running from one side of the screen to the other, and people were stunned in a demo. But it required a separate, expensive chip to compress and decompress the video.
Steve Perlman, principal scientist: Apple did not allow disruptive products.
After QuickScan was cancelled, Perlman pursued a cheaper, software-only solution to multimedia with senior scientist Eric Hoffert. They thought maybe they could achieve their goals without needing any new gear at all.
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.
Eric Hoffert, senior scientist: We experimented with many of the color block factors within the compression algorithm to optimize it, and we went after a solution very aggressively.
Perlman: Eric, Lee Mighdoll, and Dean Blackketter continued to refine the technology in simulations, so they could get software to play back video in real-time, without any hardware.
Lee Mighdoll was an intern in ATG at the time, and Blackketter was a senior programmer. Mighdoll coded alternative techniques — and admits that he has some misgivings about his choice of a final codename for the project.
Hoffert: Road Pizza is a name for animals compressed on a road when they are run over and we were trying to compress images and video (not animals) — and still look nice.
Lee Mighdoll, intern: I chose the name Road Pizza for the method as a sort of joke about compressing, lossy compression. I regretted choosing the kinda gross name, but it was too late!
Gross name aside, this was a huge breakthrough. The team had effectively shrunk all of QuickScan down into software.
Perlman: Road Pizza’s ability to decompress and play back video windows entirely in software changed everything. Every Mac (and perhaps someday every PC) inherently could have video playback capability, and thus, there was a great incentive for creators to invest in making compressed video content. Road Pizza opened up the floodgates of creative thinking and execution.
Then engineer Mark Krueger pushed the codec further.
Mark Krueger, engineer: I got the famous Ridley Scott 1984 commercial down to a tiny video playing on the Mac desktop. Bruce thought it was cool.
Bruce Leak, QuickTime lead developer: Mark made these things that weren’t systems software but highly optimized demos that would show what was possible. Once you know it’s possible, then it’s just engineering work to get it done and solve all the problems.
Following on from Road Pizza’s success, engineers and scientists who had worked on media projects across Apple created an informal project, called Warhol.
Then, unknown to almost all, a frustrated Tyler Peppel decided to pitch the multimedia product to Don Casey, Apple’s head of Networking and Communications. Peppel believed Apple had to fast-track Warhol and Road Pizza into a product or lose the market to Microsoft.
Microsoft Windows 3.0 was scheduled for debut on May 22, 1990, so Casey acted. 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.
Perlman was leaving the company, so Bruce Leak, with the experience of Color QuickDraw, and John Worthington, who led Apple’s MIDI work, were chosen to head the day-to-day development of QuickTime.
Worthington: QuickTime would be built on top of hours and hours of thinking, debate, collaboration, and testing from previous work, but now there was a deadline. Suddenly, we were off to the races.
Tom Ryan, senior manager: It wasn’t clear what QuickTime was going to be. Leak, Worthington, and Jim Batson needed to figure it out. I remember going on long walks with them. Jim was asking, “Should it be about controlling home video systems?” Then John suggested that we expand on the work of two ATG audio engineers, which in hindsight was obvious.
Steve Milne and Mark Lentzcner had previously created AIFF, which established a principle within Apple that media should be stored in a standardized, portable way that worked across different systems without being locked to specific hardware.
Toby Farrand, senior engineer: This was the key to QuickTime. Audio drove the development of QuickTime more than anything.
The task was now set. QuickTime was the way a Macintosh would handle how any media was encoded, decoded, synchronized, and delivered to users — without extra hardware.
Andrew Soderberg, product manager: For good reason, everyone thinks of QuickTime as being all about video and audio, but from the start of development, it was all about temporal, or time-based, data. Events happen in time, in sequence. It could just as easily have become famous as the underlying technology for managing when things switched on or off, much like HomeKit today, or notifications on your iPhone. In QuickTime, you can have multiple “tracks,” and everyone now imagines “tracks” as meaning video or audio tracks, but that wasn’t necessarily the use case behind the development. It didn’t matter “what” was on the track, as the software came along and saw an event on the track, it reacted as programmed at a point in time.
Soderberg: We thought of codecs for video to be like fonts for word processing. You chose the codec that was right for your use case.
The first tasks were to create a standard set of software codecs, and a media player that Macintosh users could easily access and third-party developers could use as a benchmark. The QuickTime Media Player would be the center of the user-facing experience.
Hoffert: Jim, Mike Mills, and I built some prototypes of what the Media Player should look like and do. The first time I saw it play a short clip from the movie The Wizard of Oz, I thought, “This is going to change the world. No question.”
Meanwhile, the Human Interface Group began pioneering work in digital video workflows.
Leak: It’s hard to recognize these as problems today. Hard drives were too expensive to be an option for the physical distribution of content made for QuickTime, and there was no Internet, so we had to make QuickTime work with existing physical media platforms, like CD-ROM. The theory, at the time we started, 1990, was that people would get content in the mail, on a disc!
Mike Mills, lead designer: We built prototypes for scanning, editing, and logging digital movies on the Mac and worked out how they could be incorporated into PowerPoint or email.
Chris Thorman, programmer: It was obvious that anything we did with QuickTime had to make it easy as writing and manipulating text had been in PageMaker. To make sure, we hid some of the advanced features away from users, and made them only accessible by option-clicking. Our choices were pretty good as they stayed unchanged for at least 10 years.
Leak: You had to be able to step backward, frame by frame. You had to be able to drag through it. You had to be able to scrub the audio, to be able to play the movie at faster than normal speed. The audio had to make sense. All the capabilities that we take for granted today, back then, were both a passion project and a technological challenge.
With coding and testing well under way, product managers Doug Camplejohn, Andrew Soderberg, and Duncan Kennedy connected external developers with QuickTime.
Duncan Kennedy, product manager: We decided very early on that the QuickTime interaction with developers needed to be done differently. We weren’t going to do a Microsoft, which is to say, “We have invented this API; now go away and write code to make these kinds of applications.” We just invited people to Developer Kitchens and said, “We don’t know everything, here’s where we are at.”
Sean Callahan, programmer: It often came down to the five of us, still there at 3AM, working like crazy to get stuff coded before a Developer Kitchen. I was young and didn’t have family nearby, but more importantly, this was my dream job.
Ryan: Once Doug, Duncan, and Andy had beta copies out and ran the Kitchens, it crystallized even more in my mind. People created claymation animations, parallel storylines, and training videos — creative things that were beyond what anybody on the team imagined. It was like, wow.
Leak: To be honest, it was a little like the inmates were running the asylum. Steve Jobs was gone and everybody was excited about building the future. It was the “Apple who could change the world” time — of that generation. We were all in it together. They were glorious days.
As word of the project’s progress spread across Apple, more engineers wanted to be involved. Leak was able to get in-house specialists “on loan” to solve problems.
Leak: Gary Davidian worked some magic with the hardware to give us a timer that was denominated in microseconds, which became our time manager. You could now do accurate positioning of sound and video.
George Cossey, contract programmer: Bruce had assembled a very small and tight group of what I call A+ people, both very smart and very hard workers. You were able to count on each one doing outstanding work in their area.
As the engineers ticked off the challenges, they came to yet another hardware issue. Users could not afford to fill their hard drives with multiple copies of videos for different applications.
Peter Hoddie, programmer: You had to be able to capture video, then copy it from one app and paste it into another. The Mac method of integration was very important. There wasn’t enough memory to literally copy video, so editing had to be done by reference. No one was doing this kind of thing at the time.
Perlman: It was an incredible effort to not just architect QuickTime to be scalable into the future but refine it into a product that worked on the limited-performance computers.
Despite having a tiny budget and barely a year to deliver, QuickTime stole the show at the 1991 WWDC. Bruce Leak took to the stage and played the original 1984 TV commercial as a large QuickTime movie on a standard Macintosh.
Ryan: There was an amazing reaction from I guess 3,000 people. I get goosebumps now thinking about it. All those late nights and other nonsense, but we got there and I was standing at a door giving out QuickTime starter kits as fast as I could.
A single team had ushered in the digital media era.
Soderberg: Other than Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, these were the most important engineers in Apple’s history until the advent of the iPhone.
Casey King, senior engineer
QuickTime: nothing like it before, everything like it since.
Excerpt from Inventing the Future, by John Buck
Copyright © 2026 by John Buck. Published by Books.By
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