what influence he had on SGI. “When I got the call that T. J. wanted to meet with me, I thought he wanted to complain about the bugs in our software,” says Pavan. “He was always complaining about our bugs. So I brought a list of the bugs and what we were going to do about them.” Instead T. J. had an offer for Pavan. “How would you like to build the world’s first interactive television set?” he asked. He explained that Ed McCracken had come around to Jim Clark’s way of thinking, but did not like the idea of Clark’s having his own company. Time Warner was willing to pay SGI $30 million to build what it was calling an interactive television (ITV). Whatever SGI built would be installed in four thousand homes that Time Warner was wiring for the occasion in Orlando, Florida. And on the recommendation of Jim Clark it wanted the thirty-three-year-old Pavan Nigam to run the project.
The minute Time Warner announced that it had chosen Silicon Graphics, just about every big company that had anything to do with information or entertainment leaped into action and hired its own engineers to build them a telecomputer. “There was a mad scramble,” recalls Chiddix. AT&T and Viacom announced that they were building their interactive television pilot in Castro Valley, California. TCI and Microsoft announced their pilot in Seattle. The phone company U.S. West, the computer company DEC, and the computer animation company 3DO announced their own project in Omaha, Nebraska. Oracle announced its vague intentions to get involved. When you added it all up, it implicated thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars. The telecomputer was the first big step in a new direction. Very large companies, and a lot of important investors, became swept up in the idea of an intelligent home appliance. They bought into Clark’s notion that people would shop, communicate, and amuse themselves through their televisions.
It took about three days for Ed McCracken to make the telecomputer his own and for the Orlando project to become the place to work at Silicon Graphics. Before long, Michael Douglas and Arnold Schwarzenegger had dropped into SGI’s offices to hear about the technology that would change their business. The CEO of Time Warner, Gerald Levin, rolled up to the front door of Silicon Graphics in the longest limousines anyone had ever seen. The scramble to get assigned to the project became so vicious that McCracken sent out an e-mail warning engineers about sabotaging each other’s careers. At the same time he let Pavan Nigam know that the project was critical to the future of the company. “‘Spend what you need to spend; the thing must work,’ was what Ed said,” recalls Pavan. “All of a sudden everyone thought ITV was the future of the company. All of us thought it was going to be the next big thing.” Pavan believed that “a thousand people don’t build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find.” That is exactly what he did. He started by hiring Kittu Kolluri. The telecomputer had been entrusted to Clark’s private software tutors.
To the engineers the main appeal of the telecomputer was its complexity. This was in itself an ominous sign. It’s a good rule of the technology business that the more intellectually appealing a machine, the less likely anyone will pay for it. It was not trivial to rig a system so that the fat guy on the sofa with the beer in his hand no longer needed to drive to Blockbuster to get the movie he wanted. Every fat guy required his own video stream, and a single video stream contained a huge quantity of data. The computer needed to process information more quickly than information had ever been processed. “The Orlando project turned out to be the most aggressive supercomputer project ever put together in the history of the world,” says Jim Barton, one of the senior engineers on the job. “As a
The minute Time Warner announced that it had chosen Silicon Graphics, just about every big company that had anything to do with information or entertainment leaped into action and hired its own engineers to build them a telecomputer. “There was a mad scramble,” recalls Chiddix. AT&T and Viacom announced that they were building their interactive television pilot in Castro Valley, California. TCI and Microsoft announced their pilot in Seattle. The phone company U.S. West, the computer company DEC, and the computer animation company 3DO announced their own project in Omaha, Nebraska. Oracle announced its vague intentions to get involved. When you added it all up, it implicated thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars. The telecomputer was the first big step in a new direction. Very large companies, and a lot of important investors, became swept up in the idea of an intelligent home appliance. They bought into Clark’s notion that people would shop, communicate, and amuse themselves through their televisions.
It took about three days for Ed McCracken to make the telecomputer his own and for the Orlando project to become the place to work at Silicon Graphics. Before long, Michael Douglas and Arnold Schwarzenegger had dropped into SGI’s offices to hear about the technology that would change their business. The CEO of Time Warner, Gerald Levin, rolled up to the front door of Silicon Graphics in the longest limousines anyone had ever seen. The scramble to get assigned to the project became so vicious that McCracken sent out an e-mail warning engineers about sabotaging each other’s careers. At the same time he let Pavan Nigam know that the project was critical to the future of the company. “‘Spend what you need to spend; the thing must work,’ was what Ed said,” recalls Pavan. “All of a sudden everyone thought ITV was the future of the company. All of us thought it was going to be the next big thing.” Pavan believed that “a thousand people don’t build anything; if you need to build something really complicated really fast, you hire fifty of the smartest people you can find.” That is exactly what he did. He started by hiring Kittu Kolluri. The telecomputer had been entrusted to Clark’s private software tutors.
To the engineers the main appeal of the telecomputer was its complexity. This was in itself an ominous sign. It’s a good rule of the technology business that the more intellectually appealing a machine, the less likely anyone will pay for it. It was not trivial to rig a system so that the fat guy on the sofa with the beer in his hand no longer needed to drive to Blockbuster to get the movie he wanted. Every fat guy required his own video stream, and a single video stream contained a huge quantity of data. The computer needed to process information more quickly than information had ever been processed. “The Orlando project turned out to be the most aggressive supercomputer project ever put together in the history of the world,” says Jim Barton, one of the senior engineers on the job. “As a
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