GRAVITY TEN -- Friday, September 25, 1992

Media, medium, mediums.

Multi-media. Today's big buzzword is multi-media. Great grand reason to invest in heavy-duty hardware and change over quite completely to the new graphical way of work. The computer industry was in a rut there for a while. Couldn't get people to buy into runaway hardware advances unless maybe people needed file servers or CAD/CAM workstations or something.

Now we've got multi-media, which (Praise Be) requires megabuck machine power. I like the trend, but dislike the term. Media by itself as a word is one I avoid because of its lost plurality. Once it quite clearly denoted more than one medium, but then I suppose the advertising trade misused it enough to make it singular in most minds. Singular enough so that people throw around the term "multi-media" without doing a double take. Multi-medium maybe. But not multi-media.

Howabout hypermedia? Now there's a slick term. Kinda brings dollar signs to your eyes. "Hyper" connotes "more than", and when used (by Ted Nelson) as a prefix to "text" it made sense. Hypertext... more than text. For those not familiar with the term, hypertext denotes a system of vastly interrelated textual items which you can "navigate" with the aid of a computer. With hypertext, you can be reading a history of America in the early part of this century, click on "Mencken", which might be highlighted in the sentence "H.L. Mencken was a great lover of the democratic way of life", and Presto! There's his biography, right above what you were reading. This biography might have a mention of "Mark Twain" which you might click, and Zap! You're reading about Hannibal, Missouri. Once you've had your thirsty fill of Twain, you could "backtrack" to Mencken, and then again to the history lesson that started you off. Hypertext is great for people who love digressions. It's also a good way to learn all the way around something.

But that's hyperTEXT, and soon enough people threw pictures and sounds into the fray, and (correct me if I'm wrong) this led to the term hyperMEDIA. More than media. I'm sure you can guess how I feel about this term, but as I can't think of anything better right now (except something as unglamorous as "information"), I'll leave it alone.

Most of the years I spent designing Gravity, I was down on the beach in Florida, in exile, and I didn't hear much about multi-media, or hypermedia, or CASE, or expert system shells, or object-oriented anything. This is probably lucky, as buzzwords tend to obscure things for people not privy to our Brave New Lingo (Barbara Frankel's phrase).

Better to deepen our understanding of words we already know. With this in mind, know that Gravity has four basic aspects of information: Text, Image, Sound, and System. Items can be text items, image items, sound items, or system items. Unlike your usual programming language, there are no character types, floating point types, integer types, or pointer types.

Just these four: Text, Image, Sound, System. Tomorrow I'll discuss each of these in turn.

(Yes, I know I promised to tell you about the financial side of things, but Mr. Harvey has threatened to leave us ["Perhaps if there were an 'editor' on this system I wouldn't feel constrained to read through your (I think rambling, still) messages looking for information/thoughts of interest and value to me"] and I figured it'd be a good time to steer things in his direction a bit before he goes. Keep money in mind, however. And while you're at it, keep your day jobs. We've a lot of ground to cover before I get back to how all this could be a means to make a living.)

From: Andrew Palfreyman