Hyper TV Is a ‘Really Neat Hack’
It was, recalls Steve Maller, his most exciting moment since winning the Encino Little League championship nearly two decades ago.
There he was last month on center stage--where such computer industry luminaries as Apple Inc. co-founder Steven Jobs had stood before--to unveil a new piece of computer gee-whiz technology from Apple. And this time the crowd of 4,000 packed into San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium was cheering his technology, the 800 lines of software he had cranked out over one long, sleepless weekend last October. The program Maller had casually named Hyper TV.
The software, which is still in the prototype stage, essentially blends ordinary video technology and the Macintosh computer, allowing users to combine video images and computer data on a single screen. The result is that users can create more sophisticated video and computerized presentations for education, training and other public presentations.
Hyper TV is the latest piece of wizardry Apple has introduced to showcase the Macintosh. Much like the company’s ground-breaking software HyperCard, a slick data indexing system, Hyper TV offers users a potential new application for their Macintosh machines.
And like HyperCard, written by prize-winning software author William Atkinson, Hyper TV is giving Apple another opportunity to showcase one of the bright young engineers the company has been so famous for attracting and nurturing.
But Maller, a 29-year-old college dropout, is the first to admit that he’s lived a life that he thinks most parents wouldn’t want their children to read about.
“My life would probably set a bad example for kids,” he says. “My career path hasn’t exactly been linear.”
Indeed. Maller, who graduated from Birmingham High School in Van Nuys in 1977, dropped out of Occidental College in Eagle Rock before completing his freshman year and meandered for the next five years through a variety of jobs. Among them were stints selling jeans at a flea market, cooking at a health food store and as a Jack-of-all-trades “roadie” for small-time rock bands.
Wanted to Work With Hero
Maller bought his first computer in 1983, an IBM PC, and decided to teach himself programming by studying the structure of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. He parlayed his self-taught skills into a Lotus 1-2-3 consulting job at Bank of America.
“I knew nothing about financial analysis and planning,” he admits. “It was just another example of my making a commitment to do something I had no idea how to do and then running out and learning about it. It makes life real exciting.”
By 1987, Maller decided that working at Apple was what suited his talents and temperament, and he took a pay cut from his consulting job to accept a post as an “industrial design engineer.” However, his real goal was to work with his admitted “hero” Atkinson in the HyperCard group.
His wish came true last September. Among his first assignments was to write a demonstration program for a prototype computer video board manufactured by AST Research. Maller said he thought the program was merely supposed to show off the “whizzy” video capabilities of the Macintosh.
After procrastinating a week, he started writing the night of Thursday, Oct. 14, and didn’t stop except to eat until the next Monday, when he showed up at the office in Cupertino, Calif., with his program and demonstrated it for his colleagues, including Atkinson.
That night, he made some changes and demonstrated it again the following morning. By midday, Apple Chairman and President John Sculley was on the phone saying he had heard about the program and wanted a personal demonstration.
Sculley was impressed, enough so that he gave Hyper TV center stage at his presentation last month for MacWorld, the largest Macintosh products trade show. “It meets my definition of innovation,” Sculley says. “It takes two different ideas from two separate fields and combines them.”
“Yeah,” agrees Maller, lapsing into computer-speak, “It’s a really neat hack.”
