An Oral History of Alcorn McBride

The next time you’re on a theme park attraction, pay attention.

Listen as the music shifts seamlessly from one scene to the next. Feel the ride vehicle move in perfect sync with the action around you. Watch a character appear at exactly the right moment, with the sound arriving so naturally you never think twice about it.

That’s the point.

When every cue is perfectly timed, the technology disappears, and the story takes over.

For forty years, Alcorn McBride has built the systems that make those moments possible. From an office on Binloop Drive in Orlando, a team of just twenty-five people designs the show controllers, audio players, and video playback systems that power attractions around the world. If you’ve visited a theme park recently, there’s a good chance you’ve experienced an Alcorn McBride system without ever realizing it.

To celebrate the company’s fortieth anniversary, founder Steve Alcorn reflected on the journey from a one-man consulting business to one of the attractions industry’s most trusted technology companies. Along the way, he shared more than the history of a business. He told the story of an idea built on curiosity, practical engineering, and a belief that the best technology is the technology guests never notice.

Before the Beginning

Long before there was an Alcorn McBride, there was a teenager fascinated by how things worked. Steve Alcorn grew up in Los Angeles during the 1960s. His grandfather gave him a used baby grand piano, but Steve was far more interested in playing rock and roll than practicing scales. By fifteen, he was performing at dances hosted by the Beverly Hills Cotillion, where he met Linda McBride. Years later, she would become both his wife and the company’s namesake.

Music quickly became more than a hobby. Steve spent countless summer nights recording local musicians in a makeshift studio he built inside a spare bedroom. The centerpiece was a used eight-track recorder that stood nearly six feet tall and had difficulty maintaining a consistent speed, but it was enough to get started. Musicians paid by the hour, and every session became another opportunity to learn how the equipment worked and how it could work better.

Looking back, the pattern was already there: find something interesting, understand how it works, improve it.

Steve didn’t know it yet, but that instinct was about to put him in an environment where the stakes were higher than anything he’d touched before.

EPCOT, 1982

That environment turned out to be Walt Disney Imagineering.

Linda McBride became the first female engineer at WDI (then called WED), helping deliver 10 pavilions for the opening of EPCOT. Steve was running his own computer company at the time, but when that business closed, Disney asked him to help complete The American Adventure before opening day.

Engineering looked very different in 1982.

Personal computers hadn’t yet found their way onto engineers’ desks

“There was a whole room full of draftsmen drawing out the schematics,” Steve says. “It was all drawn in pencil by hand on big paper.”

The American Adventure pushed the limits of what themed entertainment technology could do. Animatronics, film, lighting, audio, and control systems all had to function together, often using hardware that had never existed before.

Then Imagineering asked Steve to become WDI’s first Systems Engineer. Steve’s role was difficult to define because the discipline itself was still emerging.

“Project engineers were usually steel and concrete guys,” Steve says. “Once the building was up, as far as they were concerned, they were done.”

Instead, Steve became the person responsible for connecting every discipline.

“The job was basically coming in with a big yellow pad of paper and going around and talking to every single person, saying what’s wrong and what do you need to fix it?“

That work introduced him to fellow engineer Jim Carstensen and to a problem (and person!) that would define the rest of his career.

Journey Into Imagination couldn’t open.  Position sensors  along the ride and the motors that propelled the vehicles were connected to over-engineering boxes in the ride track that were usually under the vehicles themselves. Steve and Jim decided to get rid of it all..

They wired the position inputs and motor controls directly to the ride control system. Twelve days later, the attraction opened.

The lesson stayed with Steve long after EPCOT opened. The best engineering solutions aren’t always the most complicated. Often, they’re the ones that remove complexity altogether. Identify the real problem, eliminate unnecessary complexity, and build reliable systems. That approach would become the foundation of Alcorn McBride for the next forty years. It also set up the next chapter, when consulting gave way to a company of its own.

The Consulting Years, 1986-1996

When Steve Alcorn founded Alcorn McBride in 1986, he wasn’t trying to build a product company.

In fact, he was trying to avoid one.

His previous computer business convinced him to stay away from manufacturing. Alcorn McBride and Associates began as a small engineering consultancy, assembling freelance engineers to solve technical problems for whoever needed them.

For the next decade, no two projects looked alike. Steve’s background in the music industry led to work on a 16-bit drum machine for Akai and digital playback hardware for 360 Systems. Other projects came through referrals and word of mouth: electronic lockboxes for real estate agents, Caribbean Stud poker systems for Las Vegas casinos, HVAC controllers for supermarket chains, and a steady stream of custom engineering challenges.

Yet one industry kept returning: themed entertainment. The company developed an interactive exhibit for the Los Angeles Zoo featuring Betty White as a Pepper’s Ghost, engineered motion-based theater controls, and supported attractions that pushed technology into areas few companies were willing to explore. Each project reinforced the same lesson Steve had learned at EPCOT: parks needed better tools.

“I just thought we’d be developing random projects all year long, every year,” Steve says. “I never expected there to be more than a half dozen people involved.”

But the pattern was becoming impossible to ignore. Theme parks were solving the same problems over and over because reliable commercial products didn’t exist. The opportunity wasn’t another consulting contract. It was creating the products the industry had been building for itself all along.

That realization changed the company’s direction.

The V16, 1989

The turning point arrived with a phone call from Walt Disney Imagineering.

They needed a controller capable of operating sixteen laserdisc players simultaneously.

“There was only one problem: it didn’t exist.”

“Being an entrepreneur, I said, ‘Well, yes, of course we have that.’ We didn’t.”

Steve designed, built, installed, and programmed the V16 in time for opening. Released in 1989, it became the first commercially available standardized show controller built specifically for themed entertainment. That success moved Alcorn McBride from solving one customer’s problem to serving an entire industry.

For the first time, Alcorn McBride wasn’t simply solving one customer’s problem. It was creating products for an entire industry. The V16 established the direction the company would follow for the next four decades.

The Binloop, 1992

Attraction audio still ran on magnetic tape loops, spinning in bins across the parks. Steve had sketched a solid-state replacement years earlier, but the technology wasn’t there yet. The answer came from Disneyland’s parade route.

The Main Street Electrical Parade required perfectly synchronized playback across moving floats and fixed speakers. Steve recognized that playback wasn’t the difficult part. Control was.

“Audio playback is the easy part – getting it to be controllable in all the crazy ways theme parks want it to be used, where you have SMPTE, serial communications, MIDI, Ethernet, parallel inputs, pre-built triggers, a built-in timer. That’s all a control problem.”

The Binloop was engineered specifically for attractions in which reliability mattered more than general-purpose computing. No spinning hard drives. No commercial operating system. Hardware and software designed together, from the chip level up.

“From a customer standpoint, the thing that has changed everything is the Binloop,” Steve says.

The product evolved continuously, eventually introducing FPGA-based instant frame search and uncompressed playback. The same capability as 1982 laserdisc players, minus the spinning discs.

“Now we can instantly play any frame anywhere in any order,” Steve says. “Which is pretty much what laser disc players could do back in 1982.”

Its name became synonymous with reliable, themed entertainment playback, and in 2022, the road outside the company’s headquarters was renamed Binloop Drive. Between the Binloop’s debut and that street naming, the company itself had made a fundamental choice about what it wanted to be.

1996: The Pivot

By 1996, that choice had become unavoidable. The consulting jobs funded the company, but they pulled engineers away from product development. Steve made the defining strategic decision to end outside consulting and focus entirely on building products. That shift opened the next phase of the company’s growth.

“Before, if an engineer wasn’t busy on a project for somebody, they would design something to fill their time, and then we would sell that as a product,” Steve says. “But in 1996, it became more serious about the engineers being assigned to develop our own products.”

The portfolio expanded. Audio players, video players, lighting controllers. The team added engineers slowly, one at a time. Steve held the headcount target at twenty because he had seen what bloat did to companies he worked for.

Remaining small wasn’t a limitation. It became part of Alcorn McBride’s strategy, forming the culture and operating model that continues to define the company today.

How We Operate

By the late 1990s, Alcorn McBride had found its direction. Products were gaining traction. Customers were returning. The company was growing, slowly and deliberately. What Steve focused on next wasn’t the products. It was the environment that produced them.

“I created Alcorn McBride because it was a company where I wanted to work. It was never about an IPO or a get-rich scheme. Having a great place to work is the sole focus.”

That belief shaped nearly every decision that followed. Weekly meetings covered engineering, sales, and company finances because Steve believed people made better decisions when they understood the business. Engineers were trusted to solve problems without layers of approval,

Whether redesigning a product or booking a last-minute flight to support a customer.

“It seems like every other company’s goal is to minimize customer support cost, whereas our goal is almost the opposite,” Steve says. “We make sure our engineers regularly get to work with our customers so they understand their pain points and what delights them.”

“We have literally flown people to the other side of the world on eight hours’ notice,” Steve says. “Each employee is empowered to make those kinds of decisions.”

The office tiki bar and the motto “Have fun. Make money” reflect the same belief: build a place people enjoy working, create products they believe in, and customers will notice the difference.

Forty years later, that approach has outlasted every technology the company has shipped.

“The most gratifying thing to me is being able to be retired now and see that the culture still exists and the people working here now have the same attitude and are still having fun and making money by making customers happy.”

The Ones That Didn’t Work

Not every idea became a success, and Steve wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

The DMX Override elegantly solved a maintenance problem for churches, but Alcorn McBride lacked the distribution network to reach that market.

“We built a run of 100, and it took us fifteen years to get rid of them,” Steve says. “It would be one a year or whatever. We’d say, ‘Hey Jim, we sold another one!'”

Then there was Mr. Mixter. The product was finished. The front panels had been manufactured. Then the chip supplier discontinued the essential component before launch.

Failure wasn’t viewed as wasted effort. Every project either became a product or a lesson. That same mindset shaped customer support.

“It’s a cliché that the customer is always right. What’s actually true is that our job is to make them look good by helping them accomplish their goal”

The Trust

When Steve retired in 2024, he didn’t sell the company or bring in outside investors.

Instead, ownership was transferred to a perpetual trust governed by the leadership team, preserving the company’s independence and culture.

In many ways, it was the last engineering problem Steve solved. The products had already proven themselves. The culture had too. The trust was designed to protect both.

He could have sold the company. Private equity firms had made offers. A larger company likely would have paid well. But selling meant answering to someone whose priorities might not match the company’s. A trust meant that Alcorn McBride could continue answering to the people it already did. Steve chose the option most likely to preserve the company for the next forty years, not just the next fiscal quarter.

Steve still drops jokes into the company Slack. He spends his time on AI and agent technology, publishing books through WritingAcademy.com, and staying on the leading edge of whatever is coming next. He has helped over 100,000 aspiring authors and published 30 books of his own.

“I recommend that young people stay on top of whatever new things they see moving along. It has always served me well to familiarize myself with the latest things. It keeps me young.”

Curiosity built the company. Curiosity still shapes what comes next.

The Next Forty

Technology will continue to change. Artificial intelligence, higher-resolution media, faster networks, and new guest expectations will reshape the industry.

What built Alcorn McBride, however, remains remarkably consistent.

Find interesting problems. Understand them. Build something better.

That mindset began in a teenager’s recording studio, continued through EPCOT, shaped a consulting company into an industry leader, and now guides a new generation of engineers. Guests will never notice the equipment. They aren’t supposed to. They’ll remember the story.

For forty years, helping create those moments has been Alcorn McBride’s role. The next chapter starts now.