Bill Warner’s Blog

In August, 2008, I visited Avid with John Buck, who is an editor writing a book on the history and people behind non-linear editing. His visit spurred me to take him (and me) on a nostalgic tour, and I figured I'd post some of the results in photos. What follows are some old and some new photos. Some are copies of photos that Jeff Bedell, Avid's employee #2, keeps in his office. I didn't crop the photos, so sometimes you'll see other photos that were around them, or the carpeted wall of the cube they are mounted on.

Here's John Buck, with some of his notes from the day. http://www.velocite.net/ John is a highly accomplished editor who worked on some of the commercials shown at the Olympics. John is sitting in a restaurant that was on our Avid history tour. More on that later.

Jeff Bedell and Bill at Avid's main entrance.

Avid is so big now that I brought my handcycle to move around easily. Greg Staten is a Product Designer for the Media Composer. What used to be an $85,000 machine delivered by truck can now fit in a box and plug into a Mac or PC

August, 2008: Jeffrey Bedell, Avid's employee #2 (still at Avid more than 20 years later, and doing very well) shows off the early prototype of Avid's JPEG compression board.
 
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For Avid's 10th anniversary, they made a nice poster. Alas, the world was a little tougher on the 20th anniversary, so Jeff just updated his poster.

That's me, packing up my desk for the move from 175 Bedford Street in Burlington, to the Burlington Woods Office Park a couple miles away, also in Burlington.

1990 photo from Avid's first real home that many called the "Loading Dock". It was about 3,000 sq ft. One big room and a single bathroom.. Used to be a machine shop. At the center you see Joe Rice, who was the main user interface designer for the Media Composer. He's talking to Eric Peters, who was Avid's CTO. In the distance is Curt Rawley, who at that time was VP Operations. He went on to be President and CEO, and grew the company from $7 million to over $400 million.

That's our new digs at 3 Burlington Woods

Jeff Bedell in 1990.

That's Bill Kaiser looking at a demo. Bill was our lead investor from Greylock, and played a crucial role in our growth.

More scenes of the move. I think that's Rob Gonsalves.

I still have that wheelchair! At that time it was ten years old. Now its 28!

Curt Rawley standing outside the main entrance to Avid World Headquarters in 1990.

Eric Peters, Jeff Bedell, Bill Warner and Joe Rice in a photo of the Media Composer from the 1997 10th anniversary poster.

Jeff Bedell stands by the wall of patents, and points to our first patent, which says "Bedell, et al"

Okay, that is pretty cool. The company's name is Avid Technology, so a few patents might be in order from time to time.

This place used be called the Lakeside. (The photo of John Buck was taken inside) In October of 1988, with just six months to go before launching our product, we had a crucial decision to make. In August of 1988 we had shown a demo of motion video on an Apollo computer. Two evangelists from Apple saw the demo - Michael Tchao and Tyler Peppel. They worked very hard to get us to switch to the Mac. Now, by this day in October, with our team of about 7 engineers inside the restaurant, we had to decide. We knew the Apollo inside and out. Eric Peters, at that time our Chief Engineer, was one of the earliest engineers at Apollo and had designed key subsystems. On the other hand, we knew almost nothing about the Mac. But on crucial tests the Mac had shown surprisingly fast performance. While we were getting 9 frames per second on the Apollo, we got 45 on the Mac! And while we got about 200K bytes/sec disk throughput on the Apollo through the file system, the Mac tested at an astounding 1200K. It was time to put our fears aside and dive into the unknown. At lunch, I asked the team if they were ready. They said yes. I told them that once we agreed, there was no turning back, and when they walked out that door, they were on the Mac.
 
It was a great decision for the company. The Mac turned out to be an amazingly good platform, and it helped Avid become what it is today.

I took John to a place that I find very inspiring and energizing, and at the same time very peaceful. This is the Old North Bridge in Concord. From "The Shot Heard Round the World." I used to come here when I was working on the Avid and need some energy and sometimes some courage. Concord always delivered.

Isn't this place just beautiful?

Just looking at this picture makes me feel good. I love this place. Doesn't this look like some sort of set-up? It wasn't.

See, John took a picture here too!

And just for good measure, when we were coming back across the bridge, some more idyllic scenes were awaiting.

It's January, 2009. Avid has won three Emmys, a Grammy, and two Oscars. Wow. I started the company in 1987, and by 1991 I had started my second company, Wildfire Communications, Inc. I ran Avid through all of 1990, a year in which we did $7 million in revenue, and then for about half of 1991. I remember back then how big the company felt, because it was flying past 50 employees, headed to 100. As a starter, I yearned for the early days, and was drawn to start again.
 
The picture above is an incredible testimony to the creativity and hard work of thousands of employees of Avid Technology, and those of Digidesign, which Avid acquired in 1995. John's visit to Boston, and our subsequent Avid history tour has made me nostalgic as well as excited. So many of the people who made the picture above are still hard at work at Avid today. Including Jeff Bedell!