🚀 go-pugleaf

I just subscribed to this group.  Could some one tell me what a 
multimedia is?

thanks
...trip

Multimedia is one of the most misused words in the 
computer industry. This is partially due to the fact
that many of the big PC manufacturers (Apple being the 
most infamous, but IBM as well) want to try to define
the word so that it looks like their machines are 
the only ones that do multimedia.

IMHO, multimedia is just the integration of different
ways of stimulating our senses. In other words, pictures
are great ways to stimulate our sense of vision, but 
moving pictures are even better. Combine a sound and a 
picture and you have stimulated another sense, and you
have put one foot into the multimedia ring as well.
Add sounds that are synchronized to the moving pictures, 
and you are talking real multimedia.* 
But what about words, you ask, text? That can be part of 
multimedia as well. The point I am trying to get across 
is that different kinds of information are absorbed by 
the wet stuff between our ears in different ways, different
mediums. Multimedia is just a word for combining these
media in some meaningful way.

Which brings up an important point: hypermedia, what's that?
Again, IMHO, hypermedia is different from multimedia. 
The key to hypermedia is that it provides ways of 
linking together different kinds of information, whatever
the medium that information is 'in'. Hypertext, a subset of
hypermedia (because text is a medium, one of many, and hyper-
media deals with information in any medium), deals with
linkages between ideas in different texts. Hypermedia and 
multimedia can interact, because links can be made to different
bits of information in different media, but they are not the 
same thing.

So, now that I have confused the issue completely, I also
disclaim to be any kind of authority on the subject. I know
that there are lots of opinions that differ from the above.
I think in the end the issue will be resolved when either 1)
the computer industry finds some other way to promote its 
products that sells more computers, or 2) somebody in the 
computer industry hits upon a definition that sells lots of
computers (for that company, anyway).

Hope that helps...

Josh

* Of course, no one has yet integrated the other three senses
into the definition. Do that and you step dangerously close to
'virtual reality', but that's another discussion group. :-)

In article <f5b401a346SM00@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> trip@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Tripatinder Chowdhry) writes:
>I just subscribed to this group.  Could some one tell me what a 
>multimedia is?
>
>thanks
>...trip


Multi-media used to mean any artwork that combines more then one media.  Paint
and pencil might be considered multi-media.  Then multi-media became a buzz
word that meant the use of slide projectors with sound track.  To this day
if you go to an audio-visual supplier and ask what they have in multimedia
they will start to sell you slide projectors, sound equipment, programmers.
I was hoping when I first found this group that I would learn more about this
theatrical control of equipment.

BUT what this group seems to center on is the presentation of images, sounds
and animation on a computer.  Much of the talk is about compression and 
decompression schemes (hardware and software) and document standards such 
that there are files for images, sounds, animation.

In terms of selling a multi-media computer, presumedly it would be a machine
that can playback realtime animation somwhere on the screen.  With image
compression chip sets out its only a matter of time until such a machine 
comes into existence.  The amiga and Next machines are probably the closest
so far although PC's and Macs and Suns are having hardware add ons to make it
happen.

mark
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Mark Jansen				               jansen@archone.tamu.edu
Visualization Laboratory,Department of Architecture    ph:409-845-0199
Texas A&M University,College Station, TX, 77843