Interval Research Corporation was founded in 1992 by
Paul Allen
Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, and philanthropist. He co-founded Microsoft Corporation with childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which h ...
and
David Liddle David Liddle is co-founder of Interval Research Corporation, consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University. While at Xerox PARC he was credited with heading development of the Xerox Star computer system. In 1982 he co-founded Meta ...
. It was a
Palo Alto
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was estab ...
laboratory and
technology incubator
Business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services starting with management training and office space and ending with venture ca ...
focusing on consumer product applications and services with a focus on the Internet.
A 1997 version of the company's web page described itself as ''"a research setting seeking to define the issues, map out the concepts and create the technology that will be important in the future....
ursuingbasic innovations in a number of early-stage technologies and
eekingto foster industries around them – sparking opportunity for entrepreneurs and highlighting a new approach to research."''.
A 1999
''Wired'' magazine article based on a memo from Paul Allen described the company as under fire from Allen to produce "less R and more D." Interval Research Corporation officially closed its doors in April 2000, while a small group of former employees were kept on to form Interval Media to continue a few specific projects. Interval Media was closed in June, 2006.
Former employees
During its brief existence, Interval employed many well-known computer technology pioneers and experts, including:
* Roberto Aiello, technologist and serial entrepreneur
*
Denise Caruso
Denise Caruso (born in 1956) is an American journalist and analyst specializing in the industries of digital technology and biotechnology. She was dubbed “the Walter Winchell of Silicon Valley” by WIRED magazine. She is the founder and executiv ...
, technology journalist
*
Franklin C. Crow
Franklin C. (Frank) Crow is a computer scientist who has made important contributions to computer graphics, including some of the first practical spatial anti-aliasing techniques. Crow also proposed the shadow volume technique for generating geom ...
, inventor of important anti-aliasing techniques
*
Sally Cruikshank
Sarah Cruikshank (born 1949) is an American cartoonist, animator and artist, whose work includes animation for the Children's Television Workshop program ''Sesame Street'', and whose short ''Quasi at the Quackadero'' (1975) was inducted into the U ...
, filmmaker and animator
*
Marc Davis, founder of Yahoo! Research Berkeley
*
Trevor Darrell
Trevor Jackson Darrell is an American computer scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research on computer vision and machine learning and is one of the leading experts on topics such as deep learni ...
, faculty at
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
and co-inventor of
Caffe
*
Paul Debevec Paul Ernest Debevec is a researcher in computer graphics at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. He is best known for his work in finding, capturing and synthesizing the bidirectional scattering distribution ...
, computer graphics researcher
*
Bruce Donald
Bruce Randall Donald (born 1958) is an American computer scientist and computational biologist. He is the James B. Duke Professor of Computer Science and Biochemistry at Duke University. He has made numerous contributions to several fields in Comp ...
, geometer and animation researcher (computer graphics), co-inventor (with Tom Ngo) of Embedded Constraint Graphics
[System for Image Manipulation and Animation Using Embedded Constraint Graphics. J. T. Ngo and B. R. Donald. U.S. Patent #5,933,150, issued August 3, 1999.](_blank)
/ref>[Accessible Animation and Customizable Graphics via Simplicial Configuration Modeling. T. Ngo, D. Cutrell, J. Dana, B. R. Donald, L. Loeb, and S. Zhu. Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH (New Orleans) July, 2000, pp. 403–410.](_blank)
/ref>
* Glenn Edens, founder of Grid Systems Corporation, which made the first laptop computer
* Caterina Fake
Caterina Fake is an American entrepreneur and businesswoman. She co-founded the websites Flickr in 2004 and Hunch in 2007. Fake has been a trustee for nonprofit organizations and was the chairwoman of Etsy. For her role in creating Flickr, Fake ...
, co-founder of Flickr
Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional ...
and Hunch
* Rolf Faste
Rolf A. Faste (1943–2003) was an American designer who made major contributions to the fields of human-centered design and design education. He is best known for his contributions to design thinking which he advanced as a 'whole person' approach ...
, Stanford design professor, who led the team that named the corporation "Interval Research"
* Lee Felsenstein
Lee Felsenstein (born April 27, 1945) is an American computer engineer who played a central role in the development of the personal computer. He was one of the original members of the Homebrew Computer Club and the designer of the Osborne 1, the ...
, designer of the first mass-produced portable computer
* Paul Freiberger
''Pirates of Silicon Valley'' is a 1999 American biographical drama television film directed by Martyn Burke and starring Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. Spanning the years 1971–1997 and based on Paul Freiberge ...
, Silicon Valley journalist
* Don Hopkins
Don Hopkins is an artist and programmer specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics. He is an alumnus of the University of Maryland, College Park, University of Maryland and a former member of the University of Maryland Huma ...
, new-media artist, The Sims
''The Sims'' is a series of life simulation video games developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. The franchise has sold nearly 200 million copies worldwide, and it is one of the best-selling video game series of all time.
The games ...
developer and pie menu
In user interface design, a pie menu or radial menu is a circular context menu where selection depends on direction. It is a graphical control element. A pie menu is made of several "pie slices" around an inactive center and works best with stylus ...
interface designer
* Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel (born 1950) is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker, and an academic. ...
, author, entrepreneur, virtual-reality artist
* Golan Levin
Golan ( he, גּוֹלָן ''Gōlān''; ar, جولان ' or ') is the name of a biblical town later known from the works of Josephus (first century CE) and Eusebius (''Onomasticon'', early 4th century CE). Archaeologists localize the biblical ci ...
, new-media artist
* Daniel Levitin
Daniel Joseph Levitin, FRSC (born December 27, 1957) is an American-Canadian cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, writer, musician, and record producer. He is the author of four ''New York Times'' best-selling books, including '' This Is You ...
, cognitive neuroscientist, best-selling author
* David Levitt, virtual reality pioneer, creator of Pantomime VR platform
* David Liddle David Liddle is co-founder of Interval Research Corporation, consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University. While at Xerox PARC he was credited with heading development of the Xerox Star computer system. In 1982 he co-founded Meta ...
, venture capitalist
* Max Mathews
Max Vernon Mathews (November 13, 1926 in Columbus, Nebraska, USA – April 21, 2011 in San Francisco, CA, USA) was a pioneer of computer music.
Biography
Mathews studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and the Ma ...
, acoustician, computer music pioneer
* Michael Naimark
Michael Naimark is an artist, inventor, and scholar in the fields of virtual reality and new media art. He is best known for his work in projection mapping, virtual travel, live global video, and cultural preservation, and often refers to this bod ...
, new-media artist
* Tom Ngo, animation researcher (computer graphics), co-inventor (with Bruce Donald
Bruce Randall Donald (born 1958) is an American computer scientist and computational biologist. He is the James B. Duke Professor of Computer Science and Biochemistry at Duke University. He has made numerous contributions to several fields in Comp ...
) of Embedded Constraint Graphics
* John R. Pierce
John Robinson Pierce (March 27, 1910 – April 2, 2002), was an American engineer and author. He did extensive work concerning radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. Additionally to his ...
, electrical engineer, inventor of satellite telecommunication and the traveling wave tube
* David P. Reed, inventor of TCP/IP
* Dean Radin
Dean Radin (; born February 29, 1952) investigates phenomena in parapsychology. Following a bachelor and master's degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in educational psychology Radin worked at Bell Labs, as a researcher at Princeton Universi ...
, a parapsychologist
* Robert Shaw, physicist and chaos theory pioneer
* Richard Shoup, creator of SuperPaint
SuperPaint was a pioneering graphics software, graphics program and framebuffer computer system developed by Richard Shoup (programmer), Richard Shoup at PARC (company), Xerox PARC. The system was first conceptualized in late 1972 and produced its ...
* Malcolm Slaney
Malcolm Slaney is an American electrical engineer, whose research has focused on machine perception and multimedia analysis. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for "contributions to perceptual signal processing and tomographic imaging". He is a consulti ...
, research scientist at Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
, IEEE Fellow
As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...
*Andrew Singer PhD, Research & Development, formerly at Radius, founder of THINK Technologies
* Gillian Crampton Smith
Gillian Crampton Smith is a British educator, interaction designer, and a pioneer of computer desktop publishing. Since the early 1980s she has developed several academic graduate programs focused on digital graphic design, typesetting and huma ...
, founder of the Computer-Related Design program at the Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the United Kingdom. It offe ...
in London, and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (also known as Interaction Ivrea or IDII) was a two-year graduate program in the field of Interaction Design operating in the town of Ivrea, in Northern Italy. It was based in the former Olivetti Study and Rese ...
in Ivrea, Italy.
* Scott Snibbe
Scott Snibbe (born 1969 in New York City) is an interactive media artist, entrepreneur, and meditation instructor who is currently the host of A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment meditation podcast. He has collaborated with other artists and musici ...
, new-media artist
* Russell Targ
Russell Targ (born April 11, 1934) is an American physicist, parapsychologist and author who is best known for his work on remote viewing.
Targ joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1972 where he and Harold E. Puthoff coined the term "rem ...
, a physicist and parapsychologist
* Bill Verplank
William "Bill" Lawrence Verplank is a designer and researcher who focuses on interactions between humans and computers. He is one of the pioneers of interaction design, a field of design that focuses on users and technology, and a term he helped c ...
, interface designer of the Xerox Star
The Xerox Star workstation, officially named Xerox 8010 Information System, is the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based ...
, the first WIMP (computing)
In human–computer interaction, WIMP stands for "windows, icons, menus, pointer", denoting a style of interaction using these elements of the user interface. Other expansions are sometimes used, such as substituting "mouse" and "mice" for men ...
GUI
* Leo Villareal
Leo Villareal (born 1967) is an American artist. His work combines LED lights and encoded computer programming to create illuminated displays. He is living and working in New York City.
Early life and education
Villareal was born in 1967 in A ...
, installation artist and Burning Man
Burning Man is an event focused on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance held annually in the western United States. The name of the event comes from its culminating ceremony: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred ...
board member
* Terry Winograd
Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intell ...
, emeritus professor of computer science at Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
*Dan Ingalls
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr. (born 1944) is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementer of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the bytecoded virtual machine that ...
, inventor of BitBLT and architect of several Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
implementations
* Tim Rowledge, designer, software engineer, Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
er, author [http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/CollectiveNBlueBook/Rowledge-Final.pdf ] originating student of the Computer-Related Design program at the Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the United Kingdom. It offe ...
References
External links
Think Tanked
''Wired'' magazine, December 1999
{{Authority control
Companies based in Palo Alto, California
Technology companies established in 1992
Technology companies disestablished in 2000
Defunct companies based in California
Business incubators of the United States
Legal disputes
Patent monetization companies of the United States