MULTIMEDIA

What is Multimedia?
Multimedia is a term that was coined by the advertising industry to mean buying ads on TV, radio, outdoor and print media. It was originally picked up by the PC industry to mean a computer that could display text in 16 colors and had a sound card. The term was a joke when you compared the PC to the Apple Macintosh which was truly a multimedia machine that could show color movies with sound and lifelike still images.
When Windows reached about version 3, and Intel was making the 386, the SoundBlaster equipped PC was beginning to approach the Mac in sound capabilities it but still had a long way to go as far as video. The Pentium processor, VGA graphics and Windows 95 nearly closed the gap with the Mac and today's with fast Pentiums, new high definition monitors and blazing fast video cards the PC has caught up with the Mac and outperforms television.
There are a number of terrific software packages that allow you to create multimedia presentations on your computer. Perhaps the best and most widely known is Microsoft's PowerPoint. With PowerPoint a user can mix text with pictures, sound and movies to produce a multimedia slideshow that's great for boardroom presentations or a computer kiosk but difficult to distribute.
Eventually, in the not too distant future, the digital movie imbedded in web pages will become the presentation delivery system of choice relegating PowerPoint to the dustbins of software. If you have ever browsed a DVD movie disk on your computer you've seen that future.
The basic elements of multimedia on a computer are:
Text
Still images
Sound
Movies
Animations
Special Effects
Text, still images and the video portion of movies are functions of your monitor, your video card and the software driver that tells Windows how your video card works. Your monitor is essentially a grid of closely spaced little luminous points called pixels which can be turned on and off like tiny light bulbs. For the sake of simplicity we'll extend our above example to say that the little bulbs can be lighted with a number of colors. Just how close together those points of light are packed is a function of your monitor. The number of colors that the luminescent points can display is a function of the monitor in concert with the video card. (If you're wondering what a video card is, follow the cable from your monitor to your computer.)