The original IBM PC, compared to today’s personal computers, was a poor, introverted little thing. It didn’t speak, sing, or play the guitar. It didn’t even display graphics well or show more than four colors at a time. Not only is today’s multimedia revolution changing the way we use PCs, but it is also changing our use of information itself. Where information was formerly de­fined as columns of numbers or pages of text, we’re now communicating with our PCs using otter voices, our ears, and our eyes—not simply to read, but also to experience graphics and sound. 

What makes a PC a multimedia PC? It’s easy to identify multimedia with a CD-ROM drive, which plays computer discs that look like the compact discs played on audio CD players. But a CD-ROM drive in itself does not multimedia make. The first CDs were collections of text— dictionaries, all of Shakespeare’s works, adaptations of self-help books—with at best a spare graphic or two. They were not what we think of as multimedia today because they did not have sound or video. In addition to a CD-ROM drive, a multimedia PC must have a sound card, speakers, and the hardware and software needed to display videos and animations. There are, in fact, industry standards for what types of hardware make up an official multimedia PC. 

The Multimedia PC standard specifies how fast a CI)-ROM must transfer data to the CPU, how much detail is in the sounds played and recorded by the sound board, and the processor power needed to handle sound and video. But today, the MPC standard should be considered only the bare minimum for multimedia. There are faster CD-ROM drives, faster video cards that produce bigger video images and that provide high-resolution, 3-D environments, and sound subsystems that capture and create richer, more realistic sounds. MPEG video provides full-screen, high-resolution video and animation. DVD drives provide the storage space for previousl\ unheard of sound and video quality.

Multimedia has also become an integral part of the Internet. It’s hard to land on a Web page that does not have an animated icon or banner. Music and video are becoming more common as Net transmission rates are ramped up by new 56K modems and JSDN. And there are products that incorporate both television and Internet computing so seamlessly that it’s hard to say if they are first TVs or computers. The answer is that they’re a new breed of home communications, albeit one that’s still in its infancy. 

But don’t get the wrong idea. Multimedia is not simply computerized TV or television. A hard drive, CD-ROM, or DVD is a random access device, the same as memory. They can all access an\ one piece of data they contain as easily as they can any other data. By contrast, a videotape, movie on film, and tape recording are sequential access devices. You can’t get to data at the end of that are sequential information—whether it’s the airport scene in Casablanca or the last track of a Pink Floyd cassette tape—unless you first go past every other piece of information embedded on the tape or film. You can fast-forward, but there’s still a big difference in the time it takes to access the first piece of information and the last. But with a movie on CD-ROM or DVD, such as ft’s a Wonderful Life or A Hard Day’s Night, you can skip directly to any scene you like. Plus a location on the video can be linked to the script, out-takes, or alternative endings. That’s the real advan­tage to multimedia CDs—sound and visuals combined with text and easy access to all of it.