h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That multimedia has been around since people realised you could write text along side your crudely
drawn cave paintings!

What's the big deal?

The difference is you read text, you look at pictures but you *experience* multimedia...

you "experience" teletext, but I'd hardly call that multimedia

Oh, how can you say that.. when it's broadcast instead of a testcard, you get that elevator music... pure multi-media! And I never said it had to be a pleasurable experience.

hmm, I suppose so

The one burning question I have though... is one of those musical greetings cards "Multimedia?"

what, those things that contain more computing power than existed in the entire world before the 1940's

Well, that wouldn't be difficult! There's also those mugs that play a tune when you lift them too...

and the ones where a picture magically appears when you put in a good brownian-motion generator

Ooh... back on track... if it played the tune, and drew the picture... that would be multimedia right? Do you know where to get an aroma plug-in for internet explorer?

I think this deserves more research

perhaps we should contact Macromedia, and suggest to them that they create a stinkwave plugin, this way it would be fully interactive, but download much faster than regular smells.

Good idea, but what hardware would you need? So far the only smells I can get out of my machine is that electrical burning smell (or if it's been a while the smell of burning dust). Would you need some kind of nasal attachment?

You would need some sort of ignore button to get rid of people with body odour.