What is Multimedia?

What is today referred to as multimedia has little to do with what most multimedia computers actually offer. There is, of course, the sound card, well and good, but the CD-ROM drive is just for big, "write-protected" disks. You can get the same effect, and better, from a 1GB harddisk any day of the week, just not as cheaply.

So, take the big read-only (CD-ROM) drive away from that Pentium computer and it will suddenly seem so much less multimedia capable, right?

That's because multimedia is the computer's ability to interact with you through the use of multiple media. A big disk drive is only able to widen the scope to which multimedia can be put to use. It no more defines, or is it part of multimedia, than your keyboard, monitor, and printer are multimedia additions to your computer.

Multiple Media ... Multimedia
Output media are printers, display monitors, television monitors, VCRs, projection screens, your audio (stereo) system, etc.
Input media are touch screens, keyboard and mouse, a microphone, a VCR, a video camera.

So, in essence, all computers are of a sort, multimedia computers. But does the mere addition of a sound card turn your "normal" computer into a multimedia computer? Hardly! Would you say that the addition of a microphone (instead of that sound card) to your "normal" computer suddenly turned it into a multimedia computer? Not likely.

But what if you added a microphone, a television, VCR, and a video camera, in addition to a sound card? Would that be more multimedia than before?

Quite so, I'm sure you'd agree.

The point, therefore, is that a computer able to produce more than a bleep sound is not a multimedia computer. Add multiple new I/O media and that then can be called multimedia.

Don't let them fool you when you buy a so-called multimedia computer, because computers have been able to interact with stereo equipment, VCRs and television sets for over a decade! It's true! A mere sound card is no great advance...