TiVo went public six months after it shipped its first box. The company was called Teleworld until July 1999, and it had a single bold idea: a hard drive under the television that recorded shows for you. You could pause a live broadcast, rewind it, and come back later. In 1999 most people still taped shows on VHS or missed them. TiVo bet that viewers wanted control of the clock, and that the TV industry would learn to live with it.

A Hard Drive Under the TV

Mike Ramsay and Jim Barton, two veterans of Silicon Graphics, started the company in 1997. Their box recorded TV to a disk and paired it with a program guide, so you picked shows by name instead of by channel and time. A monthly subscription paid for the guide. The name became a verb almost overnight. People said they would TiVo a show, the way they said they would Xerox a page.

Eighty-Seven Percent on Day One

TiVo first aimed to sell shares for $11 to $13. Demand pushed the price to $16 on September 30, 1999. The stock opened at $13.94 and closed its first day at $29.94, up 87 percent. Then came years of losses as cable companies built their own recorders. TiVo fought them with patents and won large settlements. In September 2016 Rovi bought TiVo for about $1.1 billion and took its name.

Cover: Animal Locomotion, Plate 758, Eadweard Muybridge. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for Muybridge's frozen frames of a bird in flight (pausing time).