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rajbot · 0 points · 0 comments · Oct 6

> Then at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June of 2003, along with the G5 processor and OS X 10.3 panther, Apple announced "iChat AV". This is wonderful. I love that people are still using this! I worked on iChat AV video. We also added 4-way video conferencing with H.264 support in 2004. Really did feel cutting edge back then. Lots of all-nighters in those days, hand-writing altivec and hand-optimizing h.264 to work on iMacs and iBooks that didn’t have simd..

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thepipetogrepOct 6

This is incredible and thank you for the reply. My friend and I are obsessed with computing history and this time period was especially fun for the both of us. Thank you for being a contributor to it. I'm curious, would you be open to talking about your experience on a podcast with us? https://forkbombpodcast.com/ It's noncommercial, no ads, and is just for fun. If not, I'd love to know more here. You all must of been really proud of what you built.

crestOct 6

Having to optimise for three very different microarchitectures with the G3 (short narrow pipeline, no AltiVec, small caches), G4 (short wide pipeline, focus on in-order AltiVec, useful OoO otherwise, large L2 yet memory bandwidth starved), and G5 (long and wide pipeline, focus on super-scalar OoO, AltiVec just glued on, more memory bandwidth) must have been "fun". How many variants of the codecs did you have to implement to make it work?

rootsudoOct 6

I really love HN! Thank you for working on this. You added so much enjoyment to using AIM on an eMac circa that time. People talk fondly of their 90's/80's computing experience, but this was mine. It really was a magical time...

qubexOct 6

I remember Jobs promising it would be released as an open standard. What happened behind the scenes to prevent that occurring?

dansalvatoOct 6

I was a teenager at the time and would watch all of Apple's keynotes. I remember them making a big deal for a while about H.264 support. It's very cool to get a glimpse of the context where engineers like yourself were likely proud of your work, and I'm glad that it was shown through the way that Apple talked about it.