Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality

This is the untold history of the multimedia revolution. This collection shows how the interfaces, links and interactivity we all take for granted today grew out of a series of collaborations between the arts and the sciences. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan bring together the seminal documents of the multimedia age and provide a clear explanation of the core concepts behind this medium of expression. They gather articles that are frequently cited but mostly out of print and hard to find, such as the Futurists' 1916 manifesto on cinema, which declared that the new medium would unite all media and replace the book; Tim Berner-Lee's 1989 proposal for a document-sharing network, which became the basis of the World Wide Web; and William Gibson's discussion of how he came up with the word "cyberspace". Packer and Jordan's introduction to the volume and their preface to each article lead the reader through the ground breaking developments of the multimedia story.