Videographic visionaries; Truevision, Inc.

Videographic Visionaries Truevision, Inc.

They are a talented crew committed to taking computers where no one has gone before. Their videographic boards and software applications make it possible for computers to achieve graphics of galactic proportions. In the printing and graphics

They are Truevision, Inc., of Indianapolis.

"We have all the major players signed--paint systems, digital printing, prepress," says Joseph Haaf, Truevision's director of sales and marketing." In national broadcasting, anyone using graphics is using one of our adapter boards. Everyone's using our product."

That's no exaggeration.

Everyone's using them for everything. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration uses Truevision technology in its space and shuttle program to create still images and a variety of images with higher resolution in the same video camera. The Korean broadcasters of the 1988 Olympics, whose charge was to design the most advanced, technically proficient system, used Truevision products for photo-finishing--or "grabbing"--a clear image in 1/30th of a second and zooming in and digitizing it. On the lower end of the scale, customers are trying on clothes, experimenting with new hairstyles and having their pictures printed on T-shirts, thanks also to computer-graphics technology.

Truevision's standard is international. "We'll have people at our trade shows from South America, from Australia, from Europe, and they're so excited to meet someone from Truevision," says Dennis Collins, marketing communications manager. "Our presence overseas is greater than our presence in this country."

Trade shows bring another important factor to light. People at technical shows are astounded, Collins says, when they find out that the guy manning the Truevision booth is the company controller: "And you know how to demonstrate the product? What a radical idea!"

The company was built on radical ideas.

The Truevision nucleus consists of a group of talented young engineers who worked at American Telephone & Telegraph Co.'s Bell Laboratories in Indianapolis. Their assignment to design a video-text terminal grew into a system that also included color capability and pull-down menus. Ma Bell didn't take the bait. It was 1984 and AT&T had a court-ordered divestiture on its hands. When the engineers offered to walk, the consumer products lab director made them a counteroffer.