🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <yorkw.663893690@stable.ecn.purdue.edu> yorkw@stable.ecn.purdue.edu (Willis F York) writes:
>tmedona@hpuxa.ircc.ohio-state.edu (Terry E. McDonald) writes:
>>Does anyone know what comp.multmedia stands for?
>MultiMedia is the "latest" buzzword used by the "Major" computer companys.
>(Because they saw that the AMIGA was so cool, and they wanted on the
Bandwagon) (In my opinion)
>
>The Definition eems to be a "program" that incorporates 
>all forms of information. (Text,Graphs,pictures,sounds,ect..)
>and allows a "person" to get to the information easially.
>
>A good example is i the "Malls" that have the Booths with touch screens
>Touch the section/store ya want and see/hear ad's and specials.
>
>I've seen stores (grocery) that have "Recipe" booths that show ya
>foods and give out "recipes".  Kinda Neat.
>Seems to me Multimedia is "writing computer programs for Idiots"
>ie. If it's not understandable WITHOUT thought it's too complex!.
>C-ya.

Gag...

>Macintosh... Proof that a Person can use a Computer all day and still
>not know ANYTHING about computers. 

Back, back, you geeky Amiga hackers!  Get away!  Out, out!
(Well, we've got to start the flame wars early...)

Multimedia can be what you do with your Amiga, but it's probably best defined
as integrating something other than text into your computer system.  Live
video, audio, smell (Smell-o-vision 1.0! coming soon!), and holograms all count
as possible media that can be integrated into a computer system.

You can approach multimedia from the user side by making computers easier
to use by making the interfaces more varied, or by moving jobs traditionally
done without a computer into the computer age.  Current phone switching systems
could be called multimedia in this respect.  There's also people looking at
using computers for digitally editing film and video.

You can also approach the topic from the operating system and hardware side by
understanding how high-bandwidth media such as digital video and audio can
be sent along computer nets in real time without destroying network throughput
for less-time-critical data, and designing real time operating systems that
can handle the real time guarantees necessary to handle video at real time
rates.

Some sample papers from academia (with a bias towards operating
system support for Multimedia) might be:

[Ander89]  David Anderson and Robert Wahbe "A Framework for Multimedia 
	Communication in a General-Purpose Distributed System", U.C. 
	Berkeley Technical Report  UCB/CSD 89/498, March 31, 1989
	Deals mainly with their protocols for multimedia systems which 
	keeps track of the attributes (speed, reliability, security) so that
	the media only gets the amount of overhead it needs when being sent
	across the network..

[Arons89]  B. Arons, C. Binding, K. Lantz, and C. Schmandt, "The VOX Audio 
	Server", Multimedia '89: 2nd IEEE COMSOC International Multimedia 
	Communications Workshop, Ottowa, Ontario, April 20-23 1989

	Creates an audio server model that can run on every processor and
	control sound objects on that machine -- analogous to X Windows 
	treatment of windows.  Makes software and hardware objects for
	operating on the voice data by creating "LAUDs" -- logical audio
	devices -- which could be connected together into Complex LAUDs.
	To create an applicationk, you specify how the building blocks go
	together.  Sound data was stored on each client machine with procedures
	for migrating sounds over the network.

[Binding89]  C. Binding, C. Schmandt, K. Lantz and B. Arons, "Workstation Audio 
	and Window-Based Graphics: Similarities and Differences", Technical 
	Report, Olivetti Research Center, January 31, 1989
	Discusses an audio server that controls sound objects how a 
	windowing system controls the screen.  UsesVOXes.

[Calnan87]	Roger Calnan, "ISLAND: A Distributed Multimedia System",
	Globecom Tokyo, 1987 Tokyo, Japan (IEEE Communications Society) 19.7.1 -
	19.7.5  
	Similar to Etherphone.

[Forsdick85]  H. Forsdick, "Explorations into Real Time Multimedia 
	Conferencing", Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on 
	Computer Message Systems, pp. 299-315, IFIP, September 1985

	Extensions to Diamond to support conferencing.

[Forsdick et. al.84]	"Initial Experience with Multimedia Documents in 
	Diamond" Proc. IFIP WG 6.5 Working Conference on Computer Based
	Message Services, Nottingham England 1-4May, 1984

	User interface side of Diamond.

[Lantz89]	K. Lantz, Collaboration Technology Research at Olivetti
	Research Center, Olivetti Research Center, 1989

[Leung88] W.H.Leung et.al. "A Set of Operating Systems Mechanisms to support
	Multi-media Applications", 1988 International Zurich Seminar on 
	Digital Communicationso

	Connectors to link audio devices (hardware, software) virtual circuits
	
[Ludwig87a]	L. Ludwig and  D. Dunn, "Laboratory for Emulation and Study of 
	Integrated and Coordinated Media Communication", Proceedings of 
	ACM SIGCOMM '87, Stowe, VT, August 1987, 283-291

[Ludwig87b]	L. Ludwig, "A Threaded/Flow Approach to Reconfigurable
	Distributed Systems and Service Primitives Architectures", Proceedings
	of ACM SIGCOMM '87, Stowe, Vt. August 1987 pp. 306-316

	Discusses the "Service Primitives" mentioned in [Ludwig87a]. The 
	scheme is presented with little detail "due to legal and proprietary 
	issues yet to be resolved." [Ludwig87b] 

[Naffah86]	Najah Naffah and Ahmed Karmouch, "Agora -- An Experiment in 
	Multimedia Message Systems", IEEE Computer, May 1986, pp. 56-
	Similar to Muse paper

[Sun89]	"Multimedia File System Overview", Sun Microsystems, August 1989

	Sun built extensions on top of the Unix filesystem to allow information
	about the file (description of contents, type of encoding, recording
	date) in a place apart from the main data.  Extensions allow application
	to work with typed data without actually having to worry about what type
	of data it is (encoding, compression format, etc.)

[Sventek87]	J.S. Sventek, "An Architecture supporting Multi-media 
	Integration", IEEE Computer Society Office Automation Symposium,
	Gaithersburg, MD, 27-29 April 1987, pp 46-56

	Introduces idea of connectors, similar to service primitives [Ludwig]
	and Olivetti's CLAUDs.	

[Terry88]	D. Terry and D. Swinehart, "Managing Stored Voice in the 
	Etherphone System", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 6:1, 
	February 1988 pp.  3-27
	Partially integrated systeme for voice communication and storage.
	Connection is managed by the workstation, but voice data travels over
	the internet directly to the "Etherphone" where it would be decoded and
	played back.  The system was integrated on a group of heterogeneous
	machines; all voice based processing was done by sending commands to
	the Voice Server, the machine responsible for storing and manipulating
	voice objects.  

[Thomas85]	R. Thomas, H. Forsdick, T. Crowley, R. Schaaf, R. Tomlinson, V. 
	Travers, "Diamond: A Multimedia Message System Built on a 
	Distributed Architecture", IEEE Computer, December 1985, 65-78

	Diamond is a multimedia electronic mail project.  Voice, graphics, and
	text are allowed in the message.  Single document store -- sound data
	is stored separately from other data.

Hope this helps all of you out there who are interested in Multimedia get
your reading lists started!

-- Robert Bowdidge
bowdidge@cs.ucsd.edu