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In the meantime, the CD-ROM is a 600-megabyte blank slate for designers, authors, developers and programmers to fill. Since 600 megabytes is 600 megabytes, however you physically deliver them, in the future the stuff on a CD-ROM today could easily be sold in some more efficient data containiner - or, as many observers expect, pumped into the home through a wire along the 'information superhighways' the cable and telephone industries are scrambling to define. Many companies are going ahead with CD-ROM publishing programs, regardless of the technology's limitations, because they see it as a 'test platform' - a chance to experiment now with the interactive products of the future. For the first time, large numbers of consumers are being sold chameleonic data containers that can be filled with anything that's digitizable. today, and 14 million predicted by the year's end). CD-ROMs mark the first assault of this digital revolution on the mass marketplace (with an estimated 8 million CD-ROM drives installed in the U.S. But in the digital world, any medium that stores data can present any kind of information. We're used to thinking of media as each dedicated to a single kind of artwork or product: for music, vinyl records, audio CDs and cassettes VHS tapes for video film stock for movies books, magazines and newspapers for text.

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But you'd need hundreds of floppies to match a single CD, and nobody is about to clear out an expensive hard drive - which is usually loaded with essential software and data - just to make room for this week's hot CD game.

The bytes themselves are exactly the same as they'd be if they were delivered on floppy disks and then installed on a hard disk drive like the one inside your computer. That makes it a low-cost way to mass-produce and sell big heaps of digital anything - Donald Duck or databases, poetry or pornography. Roughly speaking, a byte is a character or a piece of digital information, and a megabyte is a million of them. A CD-ROM is simply a dense data canister - a little package for a lot of bytes. The CD-ROM is neither a world-changing miracle nor a hype-driven rip-off.

#Tuneland pc game 1994 full#

The full story, as usual, is much less extreme and more prosaic. While multimedia houses flood the CD-ROM market - with encyclopedias, art guides, video games, 'interactive movies,' how-to manuals, comedy collections and more kids' products than the most acquisitive tyke could ever desire - doubters deride the format as 'yesterday's technology today,' a cumbersome, decade-old design that straitjackets anyone trying to work in the medium. Meanwhile, a chorus of been-there-done-that skeptics dismisses it as a technological dead end. The peddlers of a new technology always promise the moon, so why should CD-ROM be any different? If you listen to the multimedia industry, the CD-ROM - a disk that looks like an audio CD but plays sound, text, pictures and video on a computer - is the silvery future of publishing, a miraculous medium that's redefining communications and entertainment.

#Tuneland pc game 1994 how to#

Defining CD-ROMs CD-ROMs: Defining the New Medium How to Tell the Good From the Bad July, 1994