Comparing two revolutions, 25 years apart
Think of a technology trend that led people to pick up a suite of new skills, delve into arcane hardware details, and even change careers. Think of a technology trend that made headlines, inspired movies and TV series, and threatened to upend whole industries. Am I describing the AI revolution of the last decade? No, I’m talking about the multimedia craze of the 90s. In this article I’ll describe my experiences with multimedia 25 years ago and then discuss whether AI could ultimately follow a similar trajectory to the one traced by multimedia.
Gold fever
In the early 90s I was working at IBM, bored and looking for something new to dig my teeth into. Multimedia —computer-driven combinations of animation, images, audio, and text —was exactly what I was looking for. First, unlike the dreary compiler documentation I worked on, multimedia was cool. Multimedia was done in offices downtown filled with exposed brick and edgy graphic designers. Second, it was the future. Soon, old media like movies and books would be replaced with interactive, dynamic art rendered on CD-ROMs. Third, it was lucrative. For somebody with the right skills and some creativity, multimedia had to be a goldmine. Or so I thought.
