Al Macovski joined SRI in 1960 as a senior television engineer in Bill Evans's TV Lab, where he led many projects on television technology. His background of ten years at RCA prepared him well for his SRI assignment.
He immediately became recognized as one of the most creative of all of SRI's staff, amassing hundreds of patents. To many people, Al was the most prolific of all of SRI's inventors. Almost all his projects were based on some new and novel idea of his. Today he has about 300 US patents.
The 3M Company asked SRI to investigate the possibility of recording television images on high-resolution photographic film, using an electron-beam technique. Al and his TV Lab coworkers worked with Phil Rice and his lab to develop an optical recording and playback system, avoiding the complexities of an electron-beam approach. They successfully demonstrated the first video disk recording/playback system in the early 1960s.
One of the most clever and creative contributions was Al's idea for recording color images on black-and-white film, which led to his invention of a single-tube color TV camera. Until that time, color television required three separate cameras, one for each of the primary colors. They had to be carefully registered, which increased the cost and complexity. RCA's sponsorship to continue the work led initially to very low cost studio cameras and finally to cheap home camcorder systems. The camcorders we see everywhere today use a single sensing array with color-encoding filters.
During all this prolific activity, Al worked on and received his Ph.D. at Stanford, specializing in real time holographic imaging. He also obtained a license as a patent agent, so that he was better able to file his own patent applications.
Those who had the privilege of working with him will never forget his gentle but firm encouragement and inspiration toward a high level of technical integrity and creativeness. He taught us all by example. By very creative hard work and a strong technical integrity, he was a true inspirational mentor to us all.