SWE 423: Multimedia Systems

Chapter 1: Introduction

What constitutes Multimedia

Multimedia involves several major
industries

computing
telecommunications
publishing
consumer audio-video
electronics
television/movie/broadcasting

Brief History of Multimedia Systems

Year

Events

prior industrial Written Letters, Books, Poetry, Bulletin boards

Revolution
Late 1890s

Radio was introduced

Early 1900s

Movie was introduced

1940s

Television was introduced

1960s

Concept of hypertext systems was developed

Early 1980s

Personal computer was introduced

1980-present

Several digital audio, image, and video coding standards have

been developed.

1983

Internet is born, TCP/IP protocol was established. Audio CD

was introduced.

1990

Tim Berners-Lee proposed the WWW. HTML was developed.

1993-present

Several Web browsers, hypertext languages were developed.

Mid 1990s

High Definition Television standard was established.

Electronic Numerical Integrator And

Calculator (ENIAC)
Built at the University of Pennsylvania between
1943 and 1945 by two professors
On the premise of replacing all computers!
Women employed calculating the firing tables for the army's
artillery guns

Filled a 6 by 12 meter room, weighed 30 tons!

A Female Computer: I was astounded that it
took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000

To perform

Circumference = 3.14 * diameter

on ENIAC you had to rearrange a large number of patch cords and then locate
three particular knobs on that vast wall of knobs and set them to 3, 1, and 4

Multimedia is still at its infancy

Cannot avoid fuzziness in scope,
multiplicity of definitions and nonstabilized terminology.

MIT Media Lab in Boston

One of the first and best known institutes
that studied multimedia

Innovative applications
Personalized newspapers
Life-sized holograms
Telephones that chat with callers
...

Great Impact of Multimedia

Integrating all media in the computer allows
using the existing computer power to
represent information interactively.
This can, also, be transmitted over computer
networks.

Interdisciplinary Aspects of Multimedia

Telecommunication industry
Consumer electronics industry
TV and radio broadcasting sector
Publishing industry

Applications
Learning

Design

User Interface

Systems

Content Documents Security Semantics Synchro Group

Analysis
nization Comm.

Media Server

Operating Systems

Comunication

Optical Storage

Quality of Service

Networks

Basics

Services

Usage

Multimedia Highlights

Computer
Architecture

Databases

Programming

Compression
Graphics &
Images

Animation

Video

Audio