cs196006@cs.brown.edu (Josh Hendrix) (03/23/91)
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. :-)