This article was originally published on The Rough Cut by Eddie AI. For the full piece, please click here.

The walls were bare. Concrete floor, uneven.

A single phone line, a borrowed desk, and the faint smell of rust still lingering in the air. If you had wandered into that disused machine shop in Boston circa 1988, you wouldn’t have seen the future of Hollywood.

You’d have seen a startup that barely qualified as a company.

Just two guys, Bill Warner and Eric Peters, crouched over mismatched monitors, surrounded by the whine of drives and the hum of ambition.

Warner had been working in marketing at Apollo Computer for 4 years when he ran into a problem. The company asked him to cut a promo video for their high-performance workstations, and he figured, how hard could it be?

Write the script, shoot footage, and maybe borrow an editor for a few hours. RIght?

Wrong.

Cue a week-long nightmare. The editing process was painful. What followed was bouncing between tape decks, linear systems, and a $3,000 bill.

He asked his colleague and engineer, Eric Peters, a deceptively casual question:

“Why can’t we just do this ourselves?”

Most engineers would’ve laughed. Eric didn’t. He opened a notebook and sketched something radical: a video editing interface that worked like writing software.

Something nonlinear. Intuitive. Something you could do with a mouse.

They pitched the idea to Apollo’s top brass.

“Meh,” said Apollo.

And that was that.

So they quit.

No investment. No roadmap. Just a basement and a dream.

Family Vacation, a Camcorder, and a Perfect Crime

Bill Warner cleaning the Avid office floor.Courtesy of Bill Warner

Bill Warner cleaning the Avid office floor. Courtesy of Bill Warner / billwarner.posthaven.com

Bill got his first camera at age six. A Kodak Brownie. Later, an Instamatic. Then, at fifteen, a Nikon FTN metal, manual, and heavy in the hands. A camera that felt like graduating college.

Before there was Avid, there was Star Trek. Every Friday night, Bill Warner parked himself in front of the family TV, battling his sister over the dial.

She wanted courtroom drama. Bill wanted Captain Kirk. He won. Thankfully.

Because while Spock preached logic, it was Kirk, the swaggering idealist who followed his gut and came out on top.

For Bill, that wasn’t just sci-fi. It was a blueprint. Even before he had the language for it, Star Trek was planting a seed: that great technology isn’t just about function.

It’s about feeling. Following heart over head.

But..Bill took his head to St. Louis. Literally. He majored in economics, not out of love, but logic. A “good thing to do.” He clipped Wall Street Journal articles, convincing himself that it made him a serious student.

In truth, he was just inventing a version of himself he thought the world wanted.

Then came the ice. Then the tree.

Suddenly, he was in a hospital bed in New York City with a broken back and staring at a life he’d have to reinvent again.

At the hospital, he met a guy called Tom Wade. Quadriplegic. Like Christopher Reeve, Tom couldn’t move his arms or legs. And yet, somehow, he moved something in Bill.

One day, Tom was on the phone with his girlfriend. Someone had cradled the receiver for him, but when it came time to hang up, he told the hospital operator: “No, I can’t. I can’t hang up the phone.”

And Bill thought: This is ridiculous.

So he got to work.

The Whistle System 3. Bill Warner’s early invention.

He bought a whistle switch, one of those breath-triggered gadgets, and rigged it up over Tom’s bed. Connected it to a light.

That moment lit the fuse. He spent the next few years building what he called the Whistle System: a DIY smart home for the paralyzed. Lights. Channels. Phones. All triggered with a puff of air. It wasn’t just a hack—it was a revelation. Technology could restore agency. Interface could equal freedom.

By 22, he’d dropped economics, enrolled at MIT, and locked in on one obsession: building tools that let people express themselves.

That early obsession would become the seed that grew into Avid.

Back at the Warner house…

Doc Brown and Marty McFly using a JVC camcorder in ‘Back to the Future’Credit: Universal Pictures

When camcorders finally shrank enough to hold, he bought one for $2,000 ($6K today): a bulky battery pack on the hip and a lens the size of a Pringles can.

Then came a family trip to Palm Springs, California. Everyone was in town, siblings, cousins, the whole noisy Jersey clan.

Warner had an idea: script a heist comedy starring his nieces and nephews. He called it Take the Money and Run.

He wrote it. Directed it. Shot it.

Then made one fatal mistake: he tried editing it.

Post-production back then meant sitting cross-legged in front of his parents’ fake fireplace, connecting the camcorder to their living room VCR. Two machines. No software. Every punch-in had to be perfectly timed or you start over.

They couldn’t watch TV for three days.

He nearly gave up. Probably should have. But when he played it back, the joy in the room made it worth it.

And somewhere between the glitches and the rewinds, it clicked.

There had to be a better way to edit.

Now, by day, Bill Warner was in the marketing department at Apollo Computer, helping sell high-end workstations to engineers and scientists.

By night, a frustrated home video enthusiast, wrangling VCRs and cables.

But something was brewing.

The late nights, the notebook sketch, the leap into the unknown.

A question turned into a prototype.

The $300-an-Hour Lie

Editing VHS in 1994

Before there was Avid, there was just pain.

Apollo had a rudimentary system, a Panasonic knob editor, but it was still tape.

One day, Bill pitched a bold idea to Apollo: skip the brochure, let’s make a video ad for our high-end graphics workstation.

Something slick. Something pro. And this time, Bill thought, he’d do it right with one of those futuristic “computerized” editing systems.

His boss signed off, but what came next was less the future and more a $300-an-hour farce.

He called up a post house in Boston.

“You have a computerized editing system?” he asked. “Sure do,” they said.

“How much?” “$300 an hour.”

Bill winced but booked it anyway.

He arrived with a stack of tapes, no script, and a request: “I want to do it myself. Just show me the controls.”

The tech shrugged, sat him down, and began. “P is play.” The screen flickered.

“Spacebar to stop.” Then came R. Rewind. Bill froze.

“Wait. Is that… a tape deck?”

“Of course,” the tech said, confused.

Bill blinked. “You said this was computerized.”

“It is.”

“You’re just… controlling tape decks?”

“Yeah.”

The air went out of the room. The promise of digital was a lie. All the blinking lights and green phosphor screens still boiled down to linear pain and mechanical rewind. You couldn’t jump. Couldn’t rearrange.

You couldn’t think.

Bill walked out certain of two things:

The system was broken (almost literally)

And he wasn’t waiting for someone else to fix it.

This article was originally published on The Rough Cut by Eddie AI. For the full piece, please click here.