Quicktime

kind of stuff. And it's easy to take for granted that we can watch this kind of stuff on our devices on demand, wherever we are, whenever we want. But it wasn't that long ago when such a thing wasn't even possible, especially not without a specialized computer that would cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. But one collection of products, one software suite, really helped change all that.

And this suite would be quick Time. Now, as we're going to see in this episode, it gets a little tricky to talk about quick time because Apple referred to many different components of quick time as quick time. But we're gonna build up to that. Just keep in mind that when we say quick time, it's more than just a video player. It's even more than just a video editing system or even a foul format. But we'll we'll

get there. So the story of quick Time is closely tied to that of Apple and the Mac line of computers. Apple was really positioning Mac to be the computer for creative types, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and that was a calculated decision early on, and it paid off. Chances are, if you work in the creative industry, if you've been working in it for the last say, five to ten years, you've been working almost exclusively on Mac computers most likely.

I mean, we've seen some changes in the more recent years, but for the longest time, it meant that if you were doing audio editing, video editing, you were working on a Mac. Well in the nineteen eighties, this sort of got started when you had different people at Apple really experimenting with how personal computers could work in this realm. There was an engineer at Apple named Steve Perlman who tackled the challenge of bringing video playback to personal computers.

Perlman had been interested in film and television and video ever since childhood. He had experimented with clay animation while he was in school, and around that same time, which was in the nineteen seventies, he decided to build his own computer. In the mid nineteen eighties, he was fresh out of college and had already worked for companies like Colco and Atari, developing graphics, processing, hardware and all that on a liberal arts education, so he was largely self

educated in many of those fields. He joined Apple in n and he headed up a project that eventually got the name quick Scan. He was part of a team of Mac engineers who were working on multimedia support. Multimedia was sort of a catch all term, and it essentially meant that you were working on software that could display more than one form of media, as the name would suggest, so maybe it could play audio and show text, or

also show video or animation. So in the early days of multimedia, you couldn't just play digital video on a computer. The earlier versions of multimedia technology involved computers controlling external media playback devices like a laser disc player, so instead of having it native to your computer, you'd have to attach a totally independent piece of hardware and control it using specialized software and connections, and originally that's all you

could do. You could just use a computer to control the player itself, maybe navigate to different chapters on the laser disk, that kind of thing that would end up pushing the analog video out to a television set. The laser disc player itself would Later on, engineers would develop a way to play video on a computer screen within a window using essentially was a television tuner, an analog tuner that you would plug into an expansion slot on a computer. But this was an analog connector, so we're

not talking about digital media here. It's still an analog signal. And I've talked about analog signals versus digital signals in the past, but just as a quick refresher, analog signals scale to represent a specific value. UH. You would think of an analog signal as an analogy of whatever it represents, whether that's audio or video or whatever. That's why it's called UH. An analog signal, it's an analogy. They are continuous, these signals, they can be continuously variable, and a digital

signal is different. It quantifies the information it is carrying in and changes it all into digits, into zeros or ones. So an analog thermometer might use liquid mercury to create an analogy of your body temperature. So you put the thermometer in your mouth. The liquid mercury will then expand based on how warm you are, and then you can read out the the reading on the thermometer. That's the

analogy of your body temperature. A digital thermometer would quantize the heat measured by the device and then put it on a display. Now this does not automatically mean that one method is better than the other. The precision of the actual measurement is independent of whether it is digital or analog. That is a separate thing that has to

be addressed on its own. But one thing to take away from this is that digital and analog are fundamentally different approaches, and you need different types of circuits in order to process the signals or generate these signals. You couldn't send a digital video feed to an analog TV tuner in a computer. It wouldn't be able to handle that information. One of the limiting factors of bringing video into the computer world was really the problem of data.

How much information that video represents. If you wanted to create a color video, if you wanted to to to play a color video with sound as a digital file, that would require a lot of bits, all those zeros and ones in order to manage it, which means that file sizes would get incredibly large, particularly by the standards of the day, I mean by the nine standards. You were talking about computers that when they were you know, starting to creep towards the the megabyte storage as you

were like thinking, this thing is is enormous. Well, these files would dwarf that. So you weren't just limited by hard drive size for storage, I mean that's one part, but you were also limited by how much data throughput the buses in your computer were able to manage. And a bus is essentially just a pathway. It's a think of it as like a highway that data can travel through, and the width of the highway tells you how many

cars can go through at once. So if the bus has a lower throughput, if it's a narrower highway, then you get bottlenecks. You've got all these cars trying to get through, and we're assuming that all the cars can travel at the same speed. We're not taking all the other elements of traffic into account here, but if you have a narrower highway, then fewer cars can pass through

in any given amount of time. So even if you have a very fast processor, it won't do you any good if the buses can't have that capacity to carry a lot of data for every given unit of time, like every second. So how much data are we actually

talking about? Well, Apple's Advanced Technology Group or a t G had an animation team that were determined to create a computer animated short using Apple computers for all the different production side, they created a three minute presentation called Pencil Test, and it's an animated feature that features a cute little pencil icon that jumps off a MAX screen and it turns into a two dimensional figure inside our

three dimensional world. And then we follow this little pencil graphic as it attempts to try and get back into the MAX screen. It's just trying to get home. Fund side note, Andrew Stanton worked on this piece. He would later go on to write and direct feature length computer animated projects at Pixar. Anyway, according to Bruce Leak, who would become the lead developed of quick Time, this animated demonstration required an enormous amount of effort and resources to produce.

It took several minutes to render a single frame of animation, and there were five thousand frames to get through in those three minutes. So to do that, the team devoted a couple of dozen Apple computers to start rendering frames. Some of them could only render part of a frame at a time, and they would have to render another part of the frame and then assemble all of that at the end of it. Each frame took up about a megabyte of storage space, and these computers had between

forty and eighty megabytes of storage. The entire video would represent five gigabytes of data, so this is an enormous file that far outstrips the storage capacity of the computers that are actually creating the animation. So to get around this problem, the team would load about one frames worth of animation of time onto a custom digital video storage

machine that cost around a hundred thousand dollars. Then they would export those frames onto videotape, and they built the full Pencil Test animated video one hundred frames at a time onto videotape until they got all five thousand frames on there. This obviously was not something that you could load onto a floppy disk and then just plug into

your average Mac in order to watch. Even though all the animation, all the music, all the production was done on Max, so you'd actually have to watch it on something other than a Mac computer. They couldn't handle playing this back, so something would have have to be done to manage this sheer amount of information. If future Mac computers were to have a practical means of playing video on screen, quick Scan would rely upon massively parallel graphic

animation and video decompression chips. So, in other words, it required special hardware, these special chips that you would have to install into a comput eater, and Apple doesn't tend to like people opening up cases and and messing with stuff inside. Typically, the way you would get an upgrade on an Apple computer is that you would purchase it straight from Apple and you would have them install it, or you would just buy a new piece of hardware

from Apple. So this was not something that would come standard with a Macintosh. It would be very, very expensive, and ultimately Apple decided that they weren't going to pursue quick Scan as a commercial product, but as part of the actual development, Perlmand created a video codec called Road Pizza, or at least informally called road Pizza. It's usually called the Apple video codec. But what is a codec. That's a word we used to describe a technology that can

encode and decode a digital data signal. The word itself is a combination of coder and d coder code deck. It can be hardware. It typically is software the way we talk about today, but it can be a piece of hardware as well. And there are lots of different types of codex. There's not just one single version. Some are used to convert analog signals to digital signals or vice versa. Some are used as a compression technique to reduce the file size for digital information to make it

manageable for the purposes of playback storage and transfers. But they all take some form of input and transform it in some way. If you have the same codec on two ends, like if one person has a CODEC on their machine and you have a codec on your machine, it's the same codec, then you can use that to

encode information, send it to your friend. They receive it, they can then run it through the codec which will decode that information back into its original format, and then they can do whatever they need to do with it. And in the meantime, you can do stuff like compress it or change the style of signal. So interestingly, Apple would announce that it was working on a multimedia enabling product.

They had a name for it, they called it quick Time, and they announced this in n at a conference, So this was public information, but behind the scenes, there were only a few people who were even aware that Apple was trying to pursue such a thing, and very few people were actually attached to the project. Bruce Leak would end up actually kind of volunteering for this. He heard about the project from this conference, didn't know anything else

about it. He hadn't heard anything internally about it, but he had just started wrapping up work on a previous project he was in charge of over at Apple and

thought that this was a really interesting challenge. So he said in a panel discussion in two thousand eighteen that he and others had to actually ask around about this because they all thought it was a cool project, and ultimately they ended up there because Apple had sort of made this commitment that they were going to create this this software suite, but they did not yet have a

roadmap on how to actually get there. In fact, originally Apple was talking about collaborating with third parties to develop this multi media enabling platform. Ultimately, they would choose to not do that. They decided to do it all internally.

Carlman's quick Scan would never become a commercial product, as I mentioned before, largely because it had that specialized chip, but the road Pizza codec lived on to become part of quick Time, so part of the quick Scan project would become an integral part of the quick Time suite. Much of what would become quick Time emerged from various research teams within Apple's Advanced Technology Group or a t G, including the compression methodology. So this wasn't necessarily one group

for people who just started programming. They actually drew upon the expertise and the contributions of lots of different people at Apple who happened to be working on related technologies at the time. So let's talk about compression for a second. That's tricky stuff. Not only do you have to figure out how to maintain the integrity of the information you planned to store or to send while it takes up less space with video, you have another issue. You have

to figure out an efficient way to unpack it. You have to how how to decompress it. Efficiently, because if it takes too long to decompress when you want to play the video back, you get delays in playback, and that is frustrating. No one would have wanted to use quick time if it took a really long time from pushing the play button to actually getting video to play back. So that was a big challenge. The other big challenge, obviously, is how do you compress stuff without losing too much data.

That's the problem with lossy formats, and I've talked about that a lot in previous episodes. A lossy format is one in which you essentially get rid of any information that is deemed to be superfluous, unnecessary, what have you. All that gets tossed aside because if you can't see it or perceive it, then it doesn't really matter, and

then you just keep the absolutely necessary stuff. In that way, you can shrink file sizes, but that obviously raises questions as to who determines what is acceptable for loss So these were big problems that they had to tackle, but they got to work on it. And I'll talk a little bit more about their development process in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. During the development of quick Time, Leak and his team

encountered lots of different challenges. One was just getting the timing right on video and sound and making sure that they would stay in synchronous station. As Leak would say in the February panel discussion at the Computer History Museum event, we think of video as playing back at thirty frames

or sixty fields per second. I talked about that in the r c A podcasts recently, but Leak said, in reality, it's more like fifty nine point nine seven frames per second, which is really close, but uh, it can make a

difference over time. If your video is just a few seconds or a couple of minutes long, the differences might not really get to be noticeable, but as videos get longer, that discrepancy can lead to the audio and video getting further and further out of synchronization, which becomes really distracting over time. And they wanted their tool to scale up so that they could be used for longer videos, so they had to be more precise when designing the encoding tools.

Another challenge was reading information from c d s. Early on, as a computer would seek out information on a CD, you would actually have to find where in the c D the data was located. Everything else on the computer would just stop. Essentially, the computer is thing, hang on second, I'm looking for that for you, But you don't want

that to happen while you're watching video either. So Apple engineers had to work really hard to come up with solutions that would allow for a CD ROM to seek out information in the background in anticipation of when it would need to pull that data for playback purposes. And so there was some hardware stuff they were working on,

not just the software side. They also brought on an audio teams so that QuickTime would be able to work with multiple channels of audio, and that it would be able to work with different sample rates and sample sizes of audio and mix them all down to work with video. So this would involve converting all that audio into a single format that would work with the associated video files no matter what format the original audio is in. The result was a suite of soft where that was remarkably

useful and innovative for the time. So, for example, if you were watching a video on your home machine and your processor didn't quite have the umph to keep up with demands, rather than have the video stall out or two worse, have the videos start to lag behind the audio. Quick Time would adjust the frame rate. You would get fewer frames per second. That would end up making the action a little more jittery and jagged, but the action

would stay in sync with the soundtrack. So instead of the video slowing down with the same number of frames and the audio getting more and more out of sync, the video would just cut out, uh, interstitial pictures. So you might say, all right, well, to keep up with the audio, we're gonna cut frames two, three, We'll keep four, so we'll go from one to four to seven to

ten or whatever. This does make it much more jittery, as I said, but at least you're sticking with the audio instead of having the audio quickly get ahead of what you're watching. Now, if you were using a then current Mac two C I system that would be the a standard Mac at the time that quick Time was released, you would be able to play a video at a blistering ten whole frames per second at a resolution of

a hundred sixty by one pixels. And yeah, being a little facetious with that description, film plays back at twenty four frames per second um. If you have stop motion animation. A lot of stop motion animators would animate at twelve frames per second in order to kind of save a little bit on labor. But typically you want to stick too closer to twenty four and as I said, standard video is closer to thirty. They managed ten, but still

it was a phenomenal achievement. Together, the team was able to meet the goal of getting a multimedia enabling product ready to ship within a year. Bruce Leak showed off the product at the Worldwide Developers Conference in May nine. The video he showed at that event was Apple's iconic nineteen eighty four commercial for the Macintosh, one of the most famous commercials of all time, directed by none other

than Ridley Scott. The beta version for quick Time would become available in the summer of nineteen and the finished product followed on December two. The first third party product to feature the technology was a CD rom book on desk called From Alice to Ocean, which was about various locations across Australia. Sorry Australians, I didn't mean to butcher

your accent. The original release of quick Time included three codex One was the Apple video codec, essentially Road Pizza and that one was meant for live video, The second codek was responsible for coding and decoding animation, and the third was a codec for eight bit images. Many many others would follow for a quick Time over the years. Quake Time also included a player, probably the most famous

part of the quick Time suite. It also had a players. Essentially, it's a piece of software cabable of playing back files saved in the quick Time time file format. And this is where we start running into a problem, actually, or at least a frustrating issue. Apple began referring to the codec, the player, and the file format as quick Time, so

all three of these different things got the same name. However, over time the software would change, and as digital archivist Becca Bender wrote in her paper Too Many quick Times, which by the way, is a great read. It's a very short read. I recommend you you seek it out. It makes it really tricky to have a meaningful conversation about quick Time. There are two different media players that have the name quick Time. I'll talk about those a

little bit later. There are two different and actually incompatible file types, and they're they're both not only are they called quick Time, they both have the same file type designation of dot m o V, though, to make things even more confusing, they can also be dot QT. And there is a codec called quick time. Not all quick times are equal. And this the reason this is a big deal, you might wonder, well, why do you care?

Is that should you ever need to access a specific video file from say an archive, Let's say, do you know of a digital video you need to get access to it? It's useful to know whether you'll be able to play it given particular software or equipment that you have available. And I'll talk more about that a little bit later. And while I'm on the subject of confusion, if you are a gamer, you're likely familiar with the concept of quick time events, but that is a different thing.

Quick time events don't have anything to do with Apple's quick time. The QuickTime event quick time in those cases are two separate words quick time, the product from Apple is done as one word quick time. Now. Not only was QuickTime a pioneer product for computer video, it was the first Apple system software product to be sold on

its own. Previous system software products would come pre installed on new hardware, which would leave out anyone who already owned a Mac So if you bought a Mac and then this new software came out, the only option you would have is to take your existing Mac to a licensed Apple dealership and have them install the new software on your computer. You couldn't just buy it off the shelf, but quick Time change that. You could actually go to a store, you could buy it out of a box.

You could bring it home and install it on your own machine. That precedent would be followed by numerous Apple system software products, including the Systems seven operating system update for Mac os that was first of of Apple's Maco S versions to be sold in its own retail box. But quick Time also became available as a free download

with limited features. This was before the days of the Worldwide Web, so users would have to dial into a bulletin board system or BBS to download the system extension for their Mac computers. Now, initially quick Time was only for Max, but the team reluctantly had to face harsh reality, which was there were a lot of IBM PC compatible machines out there, a lot of Windows machines out there tons in fact, and if they wanted to establish their new format, they were going to have to develop a

version of quick Time for Windows. They figured it wouldn't necessarily have all the features of the Mac version, but it should at the very least allow for playback features. No one was eager to jump on that project. According to one of the team members, it was seen as an unpleasant task. Or to directly quote team member Peter Hattie quote, it's hard to understate how much that was

seen as pure evil end quote. So in not long after releasing quick Time for Mac, Apple contracted with another company called the San Francisco Canyon Company to support the quick Time tools to Windows. The first quick Time for Windows released on in November in But while Apple's intent was to disseminate quick Time across a wide variety of computers, engineers at Apple smelled something fishy the following year, so you see, they contract with this company, San Francisco Canon Company,

to help develop the quick Time for Windows. Then Microsoft comes to that same company and hires them to work on Microsoft's videos software on the Windows platform. It's called Video for Windows, and specifically they wanted them to work on video for Windows that would be running on machines that had Intel processors. In the new Video for Windows program debuted and Apple engineers suspected that the contractor had actually included some of Apple's code in Microsoft's product, so

Apple sued San Francisco Canyon Company. On December six, Apple sought and received a restraining order against Microsoft from distributing video for Windows. So Microsoft responded by stripping out all the code that the San Francisco Canyon Company had contributed to that product. A couple of years later, it became clear just how ugly the fight had become between Apple

and Microsoft. It was pretty vicious. Apple had been threatening to sue Microsoft for several billion dollars over a couple of major things, one of them being this QuickTime disagreement, and Microsoft in turn was threatening to cancel the publication of Office uh for for mac So the Office Suite, which was an incredibly popular productivity suite still is what would no longer be supported for for Macintosh. And then

there was also issues with web browsers. It just got really ugly, with both teams saying oh yeah, well, if you do that, I'm going to do this, and eventually they settled out of court. Microsoft would end up purchasing a hundred fifty million dollars of non voter stock in Apple. Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default Mac operating system browser at least until Safari really debuted, and there

were other considerations that were made as well. But yeah, it was not a pretty thing for a long time. While all that was going on, Apple engineers continued to work on an update quick Time, releasing new features and fixing bugs as they found them. Quick Time, too added support for what was essentially MIDI files and equipment. I did episodes about MIDI a while back, so if you want to learn about that fascinating technology, you should go

check those out. It's m I d I, really neat technology. However, the MIDI support would not stick around with quick Time forever. That's a bit of a spoiler alert. Before I get into that next bit, let's take another quick break to

thank our sponsor. Now, I'm not gonna go through each and every version of quick Time to talk about all the features that were added or tweaked, because that would be super dull, But I will hit some highlights and also talk about some of the software that helped raise awareness of quick Time and some of the products to A big one was popular game that came out way

back in from a developer called Cyan. That would be the infamous puzzle game Missed, in which you would try to solve a series of really tricky puzzles to work your way through narrative um and had lots and lots of quick time video in it as kind of the beginning of an era of of games that would incorporate video to various degrees of success or hilarious degrees of failure, depending upon your point of view. Software wasn't the only

source for QuickTime content, however, It's easy to forget. Streaming video has not been around that long. Before you had platforms like YouTube. Online video creators typically would upload their video files to a server, and then users would download the video files. That's how I watched the first few seasons of the web series Red Versus Blue. I would visit the site each week looking for the latest episode, and I would download it to my computer. You couldn't

just watch it in your browser. You actually had to download the file and then watch it on your computer from storage. It would take ages because I did not have very fast internet connectivity at that time and the files were pretty big. Now, you could watch the episodes on a quick time player or with red Versus Blue. Windows Media Player also would support it. This wasn't an ideal solution for content creators either, because they would often have to pay large fees for all that data moving

across the network. Rooster Teeth, the company that makes Red Versus Blue, was paying a bill that was in the thirteen th dollars per month range. That's not a small amount of cash. With quick Time three and on, Apple would release the basic suite of software for free. Users could opt to pay for a more feature rich version with a purchase of a quick Time Pro license. That version could also read lots of different image file formatsically stuff like gif I refused to say, jeff and jpeg

images as well. Outside of Apple, the I S O I e C. Motion Pictures Expert Group was working to establish standards to encode audio visual objects under the collective designation of MPEG four. During this process, several entities, including Apple, suggested that the group use Apple's quick Time file format as a basis. That's the one that uses the file extension designation of dot m o V or dot QT, but dot imo V is way more popular, and just to say, like, let's start from here as our our

foundation for this standard approach. This was Steve jobs big plan for the quick Time team when he returned to Apple. He had been sort of in exile for a few years, and when he came back. One of the things he did as he told the QuickTime team, we should make quick Time the standard for computer video, and that they were going to do this by reviewing proposals that the

IMPEG group had accepted in the past. He was saying, let's look and see what they like, and then let's make sure we write a proposal that writes toward the kind of stuff that they have accepted in the past, and now I'll give us our best chance. And it worked. Now that's not to say that the dot m ov files became the new standard, but rather the starting point

for developing that standard. The QuickTime file format formed the foundation that's a lot of alliteration for the I s O base media file format also known as i B m FF catchy, and in Apple released QuickTime four, which includes support for streaming video. Apple also published the QuickTime streaming server software right at that same time. So now we're finally seeing streaming video kind of making its way

into QuickTime support. But again that it would take. It would take the formation of several platforms like YouTube for streaming video to actually become a, you know, a reality for the average Internet user. QuickTime six, which came out in two thousand two, was the first version to support the MPEG four format for playback and for import and export.

It also supported the Flash five standard. Later, Apple updated the QuickTime file format built on ibm FF, they retained the file extension dot m o V. So now you've got two different QuickTime file formats, one pre ibm FF, one post ibm FF, and we typically call them QuickTime File Format Classic and QuickTime File Format Current. By the way, if you have a QuickTime file format a dot m o V file in front of you, it is not necessarily easy to tell which kind you have, whether it

was pre or post IBMFF. You can't really tell just by looking at it. You typically have to get more information first. If your player software can work with either type of file, you're all set. You could watch it no matter what, so it doesn't really matter to you which format it's in if you can just watch it either way. But then for Mac users you've got quick Time Player ten or player x, it's it's the room in numeral ten that released in two thousand nine, and

that changed things up considerably. First, the name was already a little confusing because the version of quick Time immediately before ten was version seven. I guess seven eight nine. Uh No, Apple chose to name quick Time ten that way because it would align with OS ten. So I'm going to give that one a pass. But the real trouble is that quick Time ten mar to departure from Apple and its support of creators, something that was a bit of a theme across multiple software suites like Garage

Band and Final Cut. Gone was the support from Middie, so it's no longer in quick Time. Gone was the frame counter indicator. Gone were some of the playback options. Gone was the ability to playback video that had been encoded with Road Pizza or Apple Animation. So, in other words, the stuff that was the formation of the earliest versions of quick Time, those were no longer compatible with the

most current version of quick Time. You could not play all QuickTime files even with this quick Time playback software, which seems counterintuitive. Uh So it does get a bit confusing. In two thousand nine, Apple began to transition over from the foundation of quick Time which is called qt Kit, sort of the underlying framework for it and they began to shift toward a different technology called a v foundation. That continued with the release of mac Os ten Lion,

which happened in October. Apples released iTunes ten point five for Windows, which actually did away with the necessity for Windows users to install quick Time. It didn't include quick Time in the installation. You didn't have to have quick Time on your computer to run iTunes. This was brand new. All other previous versions of iTunes required quick Time, so this appeared to be the beginning of the end for the venerable software in Apple chose to end support for

quick Time for Windows. Now, there are a lot of people out there who still have quick Time installed on their Windows machines. That is a bad idea because it could serve as a point of vulnerability for your computer. It could provide the opportunity for a hacker to target and exploit that software and get access to your computer

or perhaps install malware on your machine. And the reason why this is a problem is when a company stops supporting software, they no longer issue updates to it, which means they can no longer patch any vulnerabilities that are found, So any vulnerabilities that are discovered continue to be vulnerabilities. So it's a good idea to uninstall QuickTime on a Windows machine if you happen to have it on one of those seekle and alternative like VLC Media Player. By

the way, this isn't just me offering this advice. The Department of Homeland Security said the same thing. In in Apple announced that it in its effort to move from thirty two bit apps to sixty four bit apps, it would be phasing out support for older software, and that includes older versions of quick Time, including the quick Time seven player, which had remained an optional installation from mac os ten snow Leopard even as the quick Time Player

ten was released. So you might have wanted to keep quick Time seven because it had some options that QuickTime ten got rid of, including the ability to play those older QuickTime files. But now they those pieces of software will fail without compromise because of this move from the thirty two bit to the sixty four bit approach for apps. So yikes. So you could argue that QuickTime is largely obsolete today. It was very important for establishing computer video,

but today it's not nearly as instrumental technology. Uh, it is definitely obsolete on Windows machines, so things like HTML five have done away with the need for external players online like web browsers can natively play a lot of media now thanks to the the the the features of HTML five. Apple still supports quick Time for mac os ten, but the last date was ten point four and that came out several years ago, so we're kind of sun

setting it now. One other thing I do want to mention before I conclude is that an interesting thing about quick time was that it gave opportunities for developers to create time based synchronized apps that weren't necessarily video playback. Apps like the tools for quick Time were so dependent upon keeping accurate time that developers could leverage that and create software for other applications that also relied heavily on

keeping accurate time, stuff like scientific measurement software. I think that's pretty darn cool that it all came out of a desire to be able to play video on a computer screen. Anyway, that wraps up this retrospect on quick time and it's importance in technology. I look forward to doing a lot more episodes kind of like this as well as the ones where I focus on companies and people and other types of tech. If you have suggestions

for topics, send them to me. The email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can pop on over to tech stuff podcast dot com. That's our website you'll find other ways to contact me. You'll also see a link to our merchandise store that's over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. Every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works dot com