That yellow strip showing the first-down line was put into your TV by Stan Honey. The viewing enhancement was developed by Honey, 52, in the Palo Alto Craftsman where he lives with his wife, Sally, two-time U.S. yachtswoman of the year, and two Emmy Awards on the mantel.

"I worked at SRI International in military stuff and did lots of tracking and remote sensing. In 1983 I started a company called Etak, which pioneered vehicle map displays. That company was acquired by Rupert Murdoch in '89. I ended up being head of technologies for News Corp. I started working with David Hill, who was just then starting Fox Sports. He had just gotten the rights to (NHL) hockey and he asked me if it would be possible to track and highlight the hockey puck in real time. We built a system so you'd see a blue highlight around the puck and when the puck was moving fast you'd see a red trail behind it. When Fox lost the contract for hockey, we stopped doing it.

I was able to take the patents and technology out of News Corp. and start Sportvision, in 1998. Our objective was to find situations in sport that happened a lot and were important to the game but were hard to see on TV. The first down in football was a perfect example. The whole game of football is all about getting first downs.

The way it works is that we have accurate sensors on all the cameras so we're able to measure the pan, tilt, zoom, focus of each of the broadcast cameras. If you go to a sporting event and look below every camera you'll see a gold box that has the Sportvision logo on it. That's the sensor. We also characterize the distortion of the lens and we have to measure the crown of the field. We know where the first-down line is because that is entered by an operator. Given all that information, we compute where that line should appear. The electronic yard line has to lie perfectly parallel to all the regular yard lines to preserve the illusion that it's on the grass.

The system was first introduced in an ESPN Sunday night football game in the fall of '98. It wasn't announced ahead of time. When we did the hockey puck, it had been announced by Fox as 'the greatest innovation in the history of mankind.' And of course people thought, 'What about the wheel?'

The first-down line just went on the air. There was no pre-announcement at all. It really did look like it was just yellow chalk on the glass. The journalists were absolutely stunned, saying, 'How the heck did they do that?' They were wondering 'Do they vacuum it up when they're done?' In the beginning it would take a 50-foot truck full of computers to do it. Now it's down to a box of equipment the size of an apartment refrigerator.

In 2004, I left Sportvision to sail full time professionally. I'm now technical director for Team Origin, which is the British America's Cup team. The Brits haven't had the cup since they originally lost it to the schooner America 150 years ago. That's where the name Team Origin comes from.

I find that now when I'm watching football on TV I spend more time watching the line on the screen than the play. That's a bad habit picked up from going to hundreds of sporting events operating these systems where all you're focusing on is technical performance. When I was in the stands at a game, you'd overhear the occasional conversation of some kid asking his father, 'Where's the yellow line?' "

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