IEEE Multimedia, vol. 3 issue 1, pg. 10.
April - June, 1996.

Achieving the "ultimate" multimedia machine has tantalized us for many years. From a hardware perspective, we might be approaching the illusionary crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. Most PCs are now sold with audiovisual and accelerated graphics capabilities. Scanners, printers, camcorders, and video capture boards are all available at reasonable prices, and affordable networking extends the computer's reach to distant resources. Inexpensive storage devices capable of holding a useful amount of video are finally reaching the market.

In addition to the right hardware, the ultimate multimedia machine requires magical software that will let us paint our dreams into our journals, design postcards with movies of the kids in them that can be shipped to and read by Moms anywhere, search the world effortlessly for information or other products that tickle our fancy, and previsualize large-scale entertainment productions. Perhaps the software could even "trick" us into performing useful work as we interactively play!

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