History of Multimedia Systems

Newspaper were perhaps the first mass communication medium to employ Multimedia -- they used mostly text, graphics, and images.

In 1895, Gugliemo Marconi sent his first wireless radio transmission at Pontecchio, Italy. A few years later (in 1901) he detected radio waves beamed across the Atlantic. Initially invented for telegraph, radio is now a major medium for audio broadcasting.

Television was the new media for the 20th century. It brings the video and has since changed the world of mass communications.

Some of the important events in relation to Multimedia in Computing include:

• 1945 - Bush wrote about Memex
• 1967 - Negroponte formed the Architecture Machine Group at MIT
• 1969 - Nelson & Van Dam hypertext editor at Brown
• Birth of The Internet
• 1971 - Email
• 1976 - Architecture Machine Group proposal to DARPA: Multiple Media
• 1980 - Lippman & Mohl: Aspen Movie Map
• 1983 - Backer: Electronic Book
• 1985 - Negroponte, Wiesner: opened MIT Media Lab
• 1989 - Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web to CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research)
• 1990 - K. Hooper Woolsey, Apple Multimedia Lab, 100 people, educ.
• 1991 - Apple Multimedia Lab: Visual Almanac, Classroom MM Kiosk
• 1992 - the first M-bone audio multicast on the Net
• 1993 - U. Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications: NCSA Mosaic
• 1994 - Jim Clark and Marc Andreesen: Netscape
• 1995 - JAVA for platform-independent application development. Duke is the first applet.
• 1996 - Microsoft, Internet Explorer.