• Kodak announces 1.4 Megapixel sensor
• Macintosh Plus Announced
• Pagemaker 1.0
• FullPaint
• Thunderscan Digitizer
• Video scanners
• SuperChroma system
• Analog vs Digital Print Test

The year began with a bang. On the 6th of January Polaroid Corporation filed suit against Eastman Kodak for allegedly infringing on patents relating to their Instant Print technology. Just so happens that the video printer we were developing was based on that very same instant film technology. Polaroid would go on to win the lawsuit. In any event we had to immediately cease and desist from any further development on the instant print video printer... and that was the end of that project. It was to be just the first of many project deaths I would witness during my years at Kodak.

However, that didn't stop a group of us from cobbling up a 35mm camera back to our little video printer and presto chango turning it into a 35mm film recorder. After demonstrating that it might work, we got approval to work for a few weeks on a proposal. We drew up some designs and did a little market research. There were very few "slide printers" around at the time, there was one from Polaroid, one from Beseler and one from a small company in California, called Dunn Instruments. The Dunn Instruments unit was the only one priced under $5000 dollars, and we were shooting our product for the $2,000-$3000 range. Various market research estimates had projected an increase in the use of slides for presentations due to the new capabilities PC's provided, combined with new graphics and business applications. We felt confident we could resurrect the project and succesfully target this new niche so we assigned it the apt codename, "Phoenix".

Sales and marketing didn't quite buy it. They "estimated" that they would only be able to sell a couple of units a year, not even enough to pay the startup costs. Right around this same time a new device from Sony had showed up in our conference room, a brand new gizmo called a video projector. It could project video or computer graphics on just about any wall or screen, and although we might not have realized it at the time, but that was pretty much the death knell for 35mm slides and our new idea.

It would take me a few more years to discover that if sales and marketing didn't feel they could sell a million or more the first year of anything without doing anything they we reluctant to stick their necks out for anything new.

The Systems Group

Wham, bam, thank you ma'am and another project bit the dust. Not even through the first quarter and already two projects shot out from under us. It turned out that I had only been on loan to the printer team and it looked like I was going to have to go back to the "Systems Group". The Systems Group of Advanced Development was the group that had hired me in the first place. Advanced Development was a team of some of the company's best, managers video, mechanical, electrical, software and systems engineers, industrial designers, image scientists and technicians whose responsiblity was to take new technologies and try to turn them into products people might buy.

The Systems Group was responsible for providing system performance measurements, image quality simulations and ensuring that our various new electronic products worked together as a system. This last was partially accomplished by promoting the use of well established standards or when all else failed trying to promote new standards. One of the toughest issues I would have to tackle during the year was getting the various product managers to agree on the same type of video connectors on the back panel of each new product.

The Vicom Computer

One of the major assests of the Systems Group, was a sophisticated (at least for the time) image analysis and simulation computer. The VICOM computer as it was called, was actually based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor. Coincidently, the same microprocessor as resided in my lowly Macintosh 128K at home.

The VICOM computer howver was also equipped with six frame buffers for storing video resolution images and a large library of algorithms that could be applied to any one or up to all six of the individual frame buffers' contents with just one, easy to type, twenty-something character command.

User friendly the VICOM was NOT, but I realized that if the processor in the VICOM could do image processing why couldn't my Macintosh. I reasoned that before too long there would be color Macintoshes and color software programs for these color Macs that would let you manipulate images the way you could with the VICOM and possibly do much more. I would frequently suggest this possibility to the image scientist responsible for the VICOM computer, but I don't believe he had much respect for the Macintosh since he referred to it as "just a toy".

The Image Simulation Lab

In addition to the VICOM computer, which consumed a major chunk of the real estate, the Image Simulation Lab contained a wide variety of video equipment. VCR's, cameras, videodisc players, video signal generators, sync generators, RGB to NTSC and NTSC to RGB convertors, waveform monitors, NTSC and RGB monitors, a Polaroid video printer/film recorder and so on. And taking up one corner of the lab was this prototype workstation that was designed to transfer film (slides or negatives) to still video disks. This PhotoTransfer Station was the precursor to the current PhotoCD Imaging Workstation or PIW. I believe this device used a 3-tube video camera for imaging the film, which was way plenty good enough for recording on Still Video Floppies.

My first assignment with the Systems Group would be to figure out a way to conveniently hook up all of this various gear in the lab to the VICOM computer frame buffers. Not having much more than a year's experience with video, this seemed a daunting task at first. I didn't really even know what a lot of these things did. So I listened and asked questions and probably became a pest but when I knew enough about what each piece did, I decided that they could all be split into several basic types by function...

Many of these devices had multiple connectors for RGB and S (sync) cables , with pass throughs, sometimes multiple input connectors or output connectors or both. In order to sort this mess out in my mind, I decided to use MacPaint to draw a picture representing each piece of equipment along with a picture of all the input and output connections on the back of each piece. This way I could just draw lines to connect the various inputs and outputs and also determine what was missing in order to glue it all together. I developed the connection diagrams and the patch panel layout at home using MacPaint and brought the printed results into my supervisor He was quite impressed.

A Mac on My Desk at Work and All Kinds of Diagrams to Make

In fact, Andy my supervisor, was so impressed that soon I had a Macintosh Plus of my own at work. This at a time when few engineers had computers at their desks. He quickly realized the power that visuals had when attempting to convey complex concepts, especially to marketing people. He also did much too encourage my interest in the development of new products and the application of new technologies.

I spent nearly the entire month of May creating application diagrams for all the various still video products showing different configurations and cabling diagrams. Not everybody had figured out that nearly all of our new Still Video products had computer interfaces that would allow them to be controlled or even transfer images to the computer for editing or adding text. These diagrams would show the potential applications of our products when hooked up with the proper software. The primary goal was to get funding for software development, the secondary goal was to expose marketing to potential applications for the products. I soon discovered that the head of marketing hated computers and had been quoted as saying that he did not want Kodak to become a peripheral manufacturer.

The SV7500 Multidisk Recorder

As a member of the systems group it was our job to deal with issues relating to how the various products we were developing might work together in a system. At this time we had several products in the engineering model stage and could start trying to hook them up. One of the more complex products was the SV7500 or multidisk recorder, this product was an image storage device that used the Still Video floppy standard. The multidisk recorder held 30 still video floppies and could randomly access any of up to 50 images on each disk in the tray.

The multidisk recorder was simple in concept, but trying to control it with the remote was a real nightmare. There were more than 50 buttons on this thing including the alpha-numeric keypad inside the hand grip. And the system menus were overly complex and modal. My boss asked me to participate in a Tiger Team to help redesign the product interface, most probably because of my drawing abillity. I think he felt my visuals would help the team deal with a very complex task.

First Interface Designs

For the next version of the Multidisk Recorder we had developed a list of features that would hopefully make the product much more flexible and easier to use. We envisioned the Imagemaster, as we had dubbed it, to be one of the first programmable presentation devices. Sort of like having two slide projectors and a programmable controller only with video images. The remote in this new version would be reduced to about 8 buttons, a real keyboard would be built-in and it would have plug-in personality cartridges that would store different software programs. Unfortunately that device would never be built.

Master's Degree Attempt One

That fall I started towards a Master's in a new program at RIT called Interactive Video Design. Learning how to program a computer to control a videodisc player allowed new levels of interactivity to video viewing. The course would teach us how to design and program these new software programs. A large part of the first semester was dedicated to learning to draw software flow diagrams and learning to program in Pascal.

The second semester we had to come up with a proposal for a project for the class to develop in the last semester. We had to produce a concept and flow diagrams for a interactive program. At first I considered a solar system exploration game that used video from NASA satellites such as Voyager, but ruled it out after watching students in the class next to us struggling with film editing. It brought back unpleasant memories of my days in film class there and how difficult it was to have to cut up your originals for editing and as result not having much flexibility in trying different edits easily.

MacEditor - A Computer Based Non-Linear Film/Video Editor

Thus was born MacEditor, my proposal for what would later be referred to as non-linear off-line film/video editing software. Possibly the first time such software had been concieved for use with personal computers. There was quite a bit of activity occuring in this field during this time on high end computing platforms.

My idea was to create a Macintosh software program that used a film editing table, a film bin, and a Master Reel as the major iconic metaphors. The software would control two or more videodisc players which would contain your video (or film dailies transferred to videodisc). For practice you could use commercial, pre-editied videodiscs and re-edit them in different ways. The software marks the in and out points of a video clip (film strip) by using frame numbers of the videodisc. These clips or strips could be dragged and dropped into the Master reel and even repositioned relative to other segments. As a result of these actions an edit list of in/out points would be created and used to sequence the playback.

My earlier work with Computer Application Diagrams prompted me to envision using two players and a framestore to do special effects such as fades, dissolves and so forth between edits. I thought this concept might have real potential but was a bit bummed that the instructor didn't feel quite the same way. He didn't feel it was something the class could easily accomplish. I read some years later that George Lucas had been developing his EditDroid at around the same time. Avid wouldn't release their product until 1989.

I decided to drop out of the Master's program after that semester since my work on the Multidisk Recorder Tiger Team was teaching me way more than the course was. I couldn't see the logic in paying RIT thousands to learn what Kodak was already giving me the opportunity to learn while paying me for it as well.

Digitizers - Video and the Thunderscan

A number of video based digitizers were introduced during 1986. The Computer Eyes digitizer was just one we had an opportunity to play with a bit. It was a small box that connected a video camera to the serial port of the Mac and digitized the video signal into a greyscale image. It was cool device to play with. Because it only scanned one vertical line at a time you got some very interesting effects with moving subjects.

One product introduced in 1986 that I just had to have was the remarkable Thunderscan digitizer (See photo at top of page). This amazing little device replaced the ribbon cartridge on your Imagewriter printer. Using a little red LED and photo sensor it turned your Imagewriter printer into an image scanner. It was awesome, Now for the first time I could bring my photographic images into the computer and edit them.

Granted the images were only one bit images, but after playing with the Thunderscan software I was amazed at what could be represented with black and white dots. The link above shows some examples.

A Color Macintosh?

Late in the year I read about the first color Macintosh. Actually, the SuperChroma System was an add-on product for the Mac Plus from a small startup in Oregon called Computer Friends. The SuperChroma System was a metal box with some connectors on the back that could turn your B&W Mac Plus into a Mac Plus with a color monitor. It was basically a video display board that connected to the Mac Plus via the SCSI port and also to a color monitor. Included with the system was an 8 bit paint package that I believe was called MacArtist. looking back it was pretty crude but it was amazing to me then. Another available option was a color thermal wax printer from a company called Shinko. All this for about $5000 including the printer. I told Andy about the system and he told me to go ahead and order one. This was getting to be fun!

Analog vs Digital Print Comparison

One other project I was given during the year would give me the glimpse of a digital future. I was asked to produce a set of comparison prints on the SV6500 thermal printer. The test image would be sourced from a variety of video devices such as VCR's, camcorders, consumer video cameras, a high-end RGB video camera, videodisc players and so on. What I discovered wouldn't surprise many people today but it did surprise me back then.

Nearly all of the video images were crappy, especially if they had been recorded on videotape or the still video floppy, the videodisc was only slightly better, but the RGB camera signal was far superior to all because it was digitized directly into the printer framestore without first being stored on analog videotape. The digitized image could also be transferred to a computer and stored for later printing with absolutely no loss of quality. I discovered that NTSC composite video and analog recording technology really sucked and that digital image storage was the only way to go. It was definitely good enough for professional use.

What seems obvious today was not quite so obvious in 1986. Most of the engineers had video backgrounds and didn't really question the image quality of video because it was what they were used to. As I began to show my set of comparison prints around I also began my campaign to try and stop Advanced Development from wasting time messing around with video based products and begin focusing future development on digital products. I found it was going to take some time to change people's minds. Several more years in fact.

More to follow... 1987 - Real Color Macintoshes