181–190 of 202 posts
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I see your multimedia PC, and raise you an "information superhighway". That sounded cringey from the start.
Not as cringeworthy as Bill Gates' book in the 90s opting to entirely use that term, abbreviating it to "the Highway," and outright refusing to say "Internet."
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Hmm, to me the term "multimedia PC" already sounded outdated from the start, similar to the "a CD ROM can contain a whole library shelf worth of data" hype. I just thought like, this 386 PC could make sound and graphics and games. This Pentium can do it too, granted with more colors and a CD ROM drive and a fancy "where do you want to go today" movie, but does that warrant all this hype of being called "multimedia"?…
I agree. Even today I would be very reluctant to use the term "multimedia" because it sounds very dusty and boring to me. I would use "audiovisual" or something else in its place. Though it's not really necessary to call this out anymore, seeing as virtually every corner of computing is capable of a whizz-bang multimedia experience and has been for a long time.
A term from the 1990's sounds dusty compared to one from the 1950's? Interesting.
I don't know if miss Encarta but it does point out that in some ways Wikipedia feels like a step backward. Sure, wikipedia has more topics but where's a video? Where's the interactive explanations? Wikipedia feels like a 25yr old website. I know some people like that but it feels like a missed opportunity and stagnation to me
Also, lot of Wikipedia articles are geared towards experts. Sometimes I'll go there looking to learn what something is and give up because understanding the article would require familiarity the parent domain.
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I miss the state of development from that time. I was developing multimedia CD content with software like Director and Authorware[1]. We had a project and when it was released the project was clearly done. Today projects don't finish because continuous integration is a never ending story. [1] I also miss this kinds of visual programming sometimes. Authorware was very underrated imho.
I'm not familiar with Authorware specifically, but there's a whole lost world where computing was extremely rich in visuality, dynamism, and play, and the striking thing is that these qualities were expected to enhance peoples' useful output. Some of the early Smalltalk demos exhibit this beautifully, and they're from the 70s. It almost feels like the era of "rich media" embodied by Encarta, "animated storybooks", et…
I spent a whole lot of time in my collage reading random articles from the hardbound volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. That was the first exposure I had to high-quality information about the world on an incredible variety of topics. It was such a great feeling sitting in a beautiful library surrounded by books in silence isolated from the chaotic and noisy world outside. I get that now all information we can possib…
I've noticed that all Americans (and probably all English speaking countries) knows the animal Aardvark. Here in Denmark few do (where its called Jordsvin - Earthhog)- I speculate that the reason is, that English encyclopedias would mention it on the first page of the first volume and probably with a picture given its somewhat peculiar looks, and can't help to think that the Aardvark might be forgotten, now that few…
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Hmm, to me the term "multimedia PC" already sounded outdated from the start, similar to the "a CD ROM can contain a whole library shelf worth of data" hype. I just thought like, this 386 PC could make sound and graphics and games. This Pentium can do it too, granted with more colors and a CD ROM drive and a fancy "where do you want to go today" movie, but does that warrant all this hype of being called "multimedia"?…
I see your multimedia PC, and raise you an "information superhighway". That sounded cringey from the start.
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Me too - since the rise of ad-funded SEO 'content farms', it's become damn hard to find information written by someone who has even a passing familiarity with the topic.
This is largely my attitude right now. I may have also described the current internet as "giant steaming shithole" a time or two because it's so polluted with dubious information and algorithmically generated content. At the same time I've been going through some old books (mid-19th century) that were in my grandfather's house. There are some that cover extremely specific subject matters. They are well indexed, so th…
I don't know if miss Encarta but it does point out that in some ways Wikipedia feels like a step backward. Sure, wikipedia has more topics but where's a video? Where's the interactive explanations? Wikipedia feels like a 25yr old website. I know some people like that but it feels like a missed opportunity and stagnation to me
> Wikipedia feels like a 25yr old website. This is a feature. I don't want a 2020 HTML5 bloated wikipedia just to read some text.
Not all shops should be like it, not all websites should be like Wikipedia. But it’s hard to find better sites for their purposes.