History of "Multimedia" (Was:iMac AddOn (was:Future Collect - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

10 Nov 1998

Fred:

...
  On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Doug Yowza wrote:
> The term "multimedia" was known -- I remember suffering through some bad
> performance art back then.  And the MindSet PC (1984) was positioned as a
...
 > graphics and sound machine to differentiate it
from IBM, but the Amiga did
...
   a better job
(I bought mine to play with computer music). 
 In 1970 a college art prof told me that "multimedia" is 2 or more Kodak
 Carousel projectors plus a sound track.  In response to questions he did
 insist that no substitutions were permitted.

 In 1979 I used the cassette relay of a TRS-80 model 1 to advance slides
 on a Carousel.  But it was only one.  I've never had a "multimedia"
system.
...

 Has "multimedia" changed since then :-? :-)  At the camera club to which
I belong, a presentation with 2 carousel
projectors and a sound track is called "an AV", presumably meaning
audio-visual.

A friend recently gave me a good description of multimedia: "... the use of
two or more media that don't go well together.  If they did, they wouldn't
be multimedia, but form a new medium, like cinema (film + sound)"

Your prof sounds like an ultra-conservative don out of touch with the
world.  I encountered similar at [high?  Age 16] school - the German
teacher (i.e. he taut the language, not came from Germany) who didn't admit
the existence of the verb programmieren.

...
  Now all of the hype is "3D".  I have used
some 3D illusion systems, such
 as StereoGraphics.  But all of the "3D" stuff that is being hyped is on
 purely two dimensional video monitors.  What's going on?

 Can anyone explain to me in what way a processor is "3D"?? I don't
know how a processor can be 3d, though a transputer array (or
similar) could easily be 3D.  A 3D graphics system on a purely 2D display
is AFAIK one with functions like shading, hidden line removal, etc. that
you need to display 2D views of virtual 3D objects.

Philip.