In July 1989 the president of an Amiga hardware company arrived at the AmiEXPO show in Chicago on roller skates, with a petrol-powered propeller strapped to his back. Amazing Computing reported that Tim Jenison was “known in his local community for commuting in this style at speeds of up to forty miles per hour”. The company was NewTek, of Topeka, Kansas. Jenison had started it alone a few years earlier, and fourteen months after that show it shipped the Video Toaster, an Amiga card that put a television studio’s switcher, effects, titles and 3D animation on a desk for $1,595. In his own words, he had begun as “a completely frustrated videographer”.
Fast facts
- Founded: NewTek, in 1985, alone, from his home in Topeka; he was its president and later its chairman.
- Before NewTek: hardware and software engineer at ColorWare, writing CoCo Max for Tandy’s Color Computer.
- Products: Digi-View (1986), the Video Toaster (1990), the Video Toaster Flyer (shown in 1994).
- Award: an Emmy for television engineering in 1993, shared with the Toaster’s design group.
- Later: the subject of Tim’s Vermeer (2014), directed by Teller.
The Color Computer
Before the Amiga, Jenison worked at ColorWare, where, in the historian Jimmy Maher’s description, he “filled the roles of both hardware and software engineer” on products for Tandy’s eight-bit Color Computer. The best known was CoCo Max, a paint program in the manner of the Macintosh’s MacPaint. Reviewing it in February 1985, the Color Computer newsletter Undercolor was delighted: “It has long been one of my fantasies to own a Macintosh and be able to Macpaint any time I wanted to. Tim Jenison and the folks at Colorware have made that dream a reality.”
A frustrated videographer
When the Amiga arrived in 1985, Jenison left ColorWare and, Maher writes, began NewTek “as a one-man garage startup from his home in Topeka, Kansas”. Asked by NewTek’s own magazine in 1997 why he had founded the company, he went back further: “I started out a completely frustrated videographer using what at that point was up-to-date consumer equipment. The equipment really did not do what I wanted. I wanted slips, tumbles, and cool stuff.” Maher adds that even at the height of NewTek’s success he “would still consider himself something of a ‘frustrated filmmaker’”.
His first Amiga product was a way of getting pictures in. Early in 1986 he circulated colour photographs digitised on an Amiga to promote a device that was not yet on sale. Maher calls them “the first quality color photographic reproductions ever seen on an everyday PC screen”. The device went on sale late in 1986 as Digi-View. A black-and-white camera took the same picture through red, green and blue filters, and the software combined them into one image in the Amiga’s 4,096-colour HAM mode. At the end of that year Jenison told Amazing Computing about a software fix for colour cameras, whose colour signal “causes an interference pattern, because it was of a very similar frequency to the sampling rate”. Asked what customers were using Digi-View for, he said that those willing to talk about it at all would “swear me to secrecy first, because they have these get-rich-quick schemes”.
The Video Toaster
In 1987 Paul Montgomery left Electronic Arts to join him. Maher compares the pair to Wozniak and Jobs: Jenison the hardware engineer, “a quiet man, preferring to stay in his workshop and well away from the press”, Montgomery the promoter. Montgomery talked up the Video Toaster from 1987; it took until the autumn of 1990 to ship. NewTek’s advertisements listed what $1,595 bought: a “broadcast-quality four input switcher”, real-time digital video effects, a character generator for titles, a paint system and two frame buffers in 16.8 million colours, a frame grabber, an overlay genlock, a luminance keyer, and 3D modelling, rendering and animation in LightWave 3D. Its keyer cut out black or white backgrounds, not blue or green ones. Business Week, quoted in NewTek’s advertising, called the Toaster “as capable as gear normally costing $60,000”.
Jenison put the aim plainly in an NBC news report in June 1992: “What we are trying to do is to make it possible for ordinary Americans to make network-quality television.” Local stations, cable companies and production houses bought it. By 1993 Toaster-equipped Amigas running LightWave were making the space scenes of Babylon 5 and the underwater effects of seaQuest DSV (the Video Toaster entry has the details). That September the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave Jenison and the Toaster’s design group an Emmy for “developing computer technology that has brought many editing tools out of high-priced editing suites, and made them available on desktops of the television creative community”.
After the Amiga
At the National Association of Broadcasters show in March 1994, Jenison demonstrated the Flyer, a tapeless editor to add to the Toaster. Montgomery left NewTek early that year with several colleagues. As Commodore collapsed, NewTek moved its products to Windows PCs. Those were lean years: when a new chief executive, Dwight Parscale, took over the business side in 1995, “we were hanging on by our fingernails”, Jenison said. In the summer of 1997 NewTek left Topeka for San Antonio, Texas, where it later made the TriCaster live-production system. The broadcast-graphics company Vizrt bought NewTek in 2019 (see the NewTek entry).
Tim’s Vermeer
Two decades after the Toaster, Jenison turned his engineering on a painting. He suspected that the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer had used optics to get his photographic effects: a lens to throw the scene into the room, and a mirror to compare it with the canvas. To test the idea, Jenison, who had never painted, rebuilt the room shown in Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and painted it himself through his apparatus. The project took years; one reviewer counted nearly 2,000 days from first conversation to finished canvas. Teller, of Penn & Teller, directed a documentary about it, Tim’s Vermeer, narrated by Penn Jillette and in cinemas in 2014. The connection was an old one: in 1990 NewTek’s promotional tape for the Toaster had starred Penn and Teller, who worked out that its $60,000 of equipment for $1,595 earned the “clever purchaser” $58,405.
Sources
- Undercolor volume 1 number 4, February 1985, p. 20: review of CoCo Max “by Tim Jenison / Colorware”.
- Amazing Computing volume 1 number 3, April 1986, pp. 61–62: NewTek’s digitiser and its red, green and blue filter method.
- Amazing Computing volume 1 number 9, December 1986: Jenison on Digi-View’s colour-camera software and its customers.
- Amazing Computing volume 4 number 9, September 1989: AmiEXPO Chicago report (roller skates and propeller).
- INFO issue 32, September 1990, p. 59: NewTek’s promotional tape starring Penn and Teller.
- NewTek advertisements: AmigaWorld, July 1991 (the Business Week quotation); INFO issue 45, December 1991, p. 70 (what “every $1595 Video Toaster” includes; the luminance keyer).
- Amazing Computing volume 8 number 11, November 1993: the Emmy for Jenison and the Toaster design group.
- Amazing Computing volume 9 number 6, June 1994: NAB 1994, Jenison, “NewTek’s founder and President”, demonstrates the Flyer.
- Amiga Format issue 58, April 1994: Montgomery and other staff leave NewTek.
- NewTekniques volume 1 number 1, April 1997: interview, “Frustration Breeds Innovation” (Jenison as founder and chairman; the “frustrated videographer”).
- NewTekniques volume 2 number 1, February/March 1998, pp. 18–19: “Exploring NewTek” (Parscale from 1995; “hanging on by our fingernails”; the move to San Antonio in summer 1997).
- Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), chapter 5, pp. 111–140: ColorWare and CoCo Max; the garage start-up; the “frustrated filmmaker”; the first digitised images and Digi-View; Montgomery’s arrival and the Wozniak and Jobs comparison; Jenison on NBC Nightly News, 10 June 1992; the move to PCs.
- Marc Savlov, review of Tim’s Vermeer, The Austin Chronicle, 21 March 2014 (web, secondary): Jenison’s camera obscura theory, The Music Lesson, four years’ work, directed by Teller and narrated by Penn Jillette; Jenison “has never painted before”. https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/tims-vermeer-11922595/
- Tom Meek, review of Tim’s Vermeer, Paste, 27 January 2014 (web, secondary): the mirror, the reconstructed room, nearly 2,000 days. https://pastemagazine.com/movies/tims-vermeer