Larry was working a lot on what would become Stagecast.[2]
There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. As I said above, it wasn't at all clear that Apple would end up turing into the Apple we have today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)
Look up S3TC/DXTC texture compression, S3 copied Apple video codec verbatim and patented it for 3D graphics use. Somehow Apple missed that and didnt fight initial patent, result was losing couple iphone court cases 10 years later and purging S3TC from mobile.
Avid Media Composer was born and grew up on Mac hardware. Same goes for Adobe Premiere, all thanks to ATG work.
https://computerhistory.org/blog/quicktime-and-the-rise-of-m...
ATG might of saved Apple from going bankrupt in late nineties - Microsoft fucked up getting caught conspiring with Intel, paying third party contractor to steal QuickTime code https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_... Thats the origin of the infamous "Microsoft saved Apple in the nineties" myth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5TdqfNE1QU In reality:
>David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million.
Oral History of Larry Tesler part 1 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZUhobpe6XA
Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 2 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OloLXE4I5fw
Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 3 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJKW7A2rC4s
Oral History of Andy Grignon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_VtQBIEb6I Quicktime 1995-1998, iPod, iPhone https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-andy-grignon-apples-ipo... Currently Walmart of all places.
I think I disagree, but I am pretty Steve-cynical. It seemed to follow a pattern of Steve shutting down things that he wasn't in charge of, or that smacked of Sculley-era Apple?
IL4 used to have a technical library — and a kind museum of Apple products (including a Lisa) that you could play with. My manager let us know one day we might pop over to the library and "check out a few books" - a little bird had told him that we might not have to return them as the library was going bye bye.
And so it did. Eventually I think I donated my Foley and Van-Dam to a library for their book sale.
I know some people from ATG found places to stay if they really, really wanted to, but unless you could directly related your work to something on Steve's agenda, you were gone. Kim stayed and worked on voice recognition, Larry Yaeger stayed and worked on InkWell, Jerome stayed and worked on latent semantics analysis for email spam detection, etc.