2 December 1991 - Apple releases QuickTime

Digital Innovation Days

On the 2nd of December, 1991, Apple released its first public version of QuickTime and brought video to Mac users. This original version contained graphics, animations, and video codecs and garnered Apple much popularity as a leading multimedia technology giant. Though it was a huge win for the company, the reason QuickTime was highly celebrated at its release is that it brought videos to personal computers, a major ambition in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Since bringing video to personal computers was considered a huge milestone to achieve in the 1980s, significant work had been done to accomplish this goal even before the release of QuickTime. Steve Perlman, an engineer at Apple, wrote a program that allowed video playback on Mac. This was called QuickScan and was publicly demonstrated before Apple decided to cancel it, citing that this software required its own graphics chip to run. Though this program was never released, it eventually led to the development of QuickTime.

QuickTime is often praised for letting users play videos. However, what was even more revolutionising was the manner in which it played the video. QuickTime worked by letting the soundtrack play while the frame rate of the video varied accordingly. For instance, if a CPU was too slow to handle a high frame rate, some of the frames were skipped altogether to keep up with the soundtrack. To give an estimate, back then, you could play movies with 160×120 pixels at roughly 10 frames per second, on say, a Mac IIci or IIcx system.

Although this was criticised by a few at the time, what is noteworthy here is that back then, Windows was struggling to even provide a standardised audio playback, let alone a video option.