Biographies of Silicon Valley protagonists

A History of Silicon Valley

This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"

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Steve Perlman

Steve Perlman (Connecticut, 1961) studied liberal arts at Columbia University until 1983. After brief stints as a hardware engineer at Atari and Coleco, in 1984 he joined Apple, where he worked on the Macintosh's QuickTime. In 1990 Perlman was one of the Apple engineers to follow Marc Porat, Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld to General Magic. In 1994 Perlman founded Catapult Entertainment to manufacture modems for video game consoles that enabled them to add online multiplayer features. In july 1995 Perlman founded Artemis Research, later renamed WebTV, to build a set-top box based on custom hardware and software that would allow a television set attached to a telephone line to plug into an Internet service using a dial-up modem. The goal was to turn the World-wide Web into a home appliance. The WebTV set-top box was introduced in september 1996 by Sony and Philips. In april 1997 WebTV was acquired by Microsoft. In 1999 Perlman founded Rearden, an incubator of start-ups, notably Moxi Digital (2000) to network video, audio and data inside a home, later acquired by Paul Allen's Digeo in 2002, MOVA (2004) for motion capture and Ice Blink Studios for digital art, both targeting the entertainment industry, and OnLive (2007) for on-demand video-game service.

History of Silicon Valley | Biographies | History pages | Editor | Correspondence