We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many

A brief history of QuickTime

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2024-09-14 14:30:12

We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many have now forgotten the Desktop Video revolution that followed in the next decade. At its heart was support for multimedia in Apple’s QuickTime.

QuickTime isn’t a single piece of software, or even an API in Classic Mac OS, but a whole architecture to support almost any media format you could conceive of. It defines container and file formats for multiple media types, forming the basis for the MPEG-4 standard, extensible encoding and decoding of a wide variety of media using Codecs, and more.

QuickTime development was initially led by Apple’s Bruce Leak, who first demonstrated it at the Worldwide Developers Conference in May 1991 before its release as a separate set of components for System 6 and 7 in December that year. Initially it came with just three Codecs, supporting animated cartoons, regular video and 8-bit still images. Cinepak video and text tracks were added in QuickTime 1.5 the following year, when high-end Macs were capable of playing 320 x 240 video at 30 frames/s, which was groundbreaking at the time.

By the mid-1990s QuickTime was starting to flourish. Hardware support included Apple’s new PowerPC Macs in 1994, and MIDI devices, PCs running Windows, MIPS and SGI workstations. QuickTime VR (for Virtual Reality) allowed the user to navigate the virtual space within panoramic images. QuickTime media were being licensed and distributed on CD-ROMs, innovative games such as Myst depended on it, and the QuickTime project brought in revenue to Apple at a time that it was most needed.