In the 1980's before interactive video became a reality, I was involved as a scriptwriter in a project to create a mail-order multimedia course to teach accounting to managers. A prominent business college in the U.K. saw a market for distance learning. It wanted to create a learning package that would enable working professionals to acquire the knowledge of the course without physically attending the classes. We built in some primitive interactivity by using three independent media: print, audiocassette, and videocassette. The videocassette was produced with planned pauses indicated by a subtitle on screen instructing the user to stop the tape and refer to a page in the manual to read in-depth background. Similar cues were recorded on the audiocassettes. The video dramatized a business situation; the text provided facts and figures and exercises; and the audiotape had testimonial from managers. Today, we could create hyperlinks to audio files or video clips, or hyperlinks from picture to text. This kind of continuing education could now be run through a web site and a listserver or packaged in a CD-ROM. So you can see that interactive multimedia is actually a technical response shaped by a longstanding need to interrelate media and build in user input. Current computer technology enables that need to be filled.

While this book was being conceived and written, the audiovisual landscape has been changing. This phenomenon of change is something we have to learn to live with as Alvin Toffler...