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