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There is no shortage of hype and fanciful thinking about the coming
information age. But beneath it all, the technologies of computing and telecoms
are merging to change the way we work, live and have fun. So what is really
happening as the information bandwagon starts to roll and, most importantly,
how do you get on board?

You might start by buying a computer with multimedia capabilities. A
multimedia PC will cost you between £1500 and £3000, for which
you get a machine with a fast processor – probably an Intel 486 or its equivalent
– at least 4 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) and a hard disc with
a storage capacity of 250 megabytes. The ‘multimedia’ tag means that on
top of these basic elements you also get a sound card and some speakers,
plus a CD-ROM drive and a high-resolution colour monitor. An Apple Macintosh
provides much the same multimedia potential and, thanks to recent price
cuts, much the same value.

An alternative is on offer from Philips, the Dutch electronics company,
in the form of a specialised multimedia system known as CD-I. It provides
a processor and CD-ROM drive, costs around £400, and can be linked
to a normal TV set. Unlike multimedia PCs and Macs, which are general-purpose
computers as well as vehicles for multimedia, it can run only CD-I multimedia
applications. One of the first CD-Is is Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex.

Even newer is the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer System – a specialised
CD-ROM player that plugs into an ordinary TV set. The Multiplayer can be
used for games, digital video, music CDs and Kodak’s Photo-CD – a CD that
stores your own photographs. You can also link to a friend’s machine over
a normal telephone line, giving a new spin to computer gaming.

Multimedia software takes up too much space to fit on a floppy disc,
which is why all these machines incorporate CD-ROM drives and their software
comes on a shiny plastic disc indistinguishable from an audio CD. But beware
the different formats – a CD-I disc will not play in a multimedia PC, for
example, and no one knows who is going to emerge as the winner in the coming
format wars.

Prices for CD-ROMs start from around £40. For this you get –
in varying proportions – graphics, sound, animation and even video data,
and a program through which you interact with them. CD-ROMs offer a range
of educational products, reference materials, ‘expanded books’ and, leading
the field, a growing selection of entertainment software.

But first the serious stuff. The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia
and Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia are two of the high-profile reference-cum-education
contenders. Unlike traditional paper encyclopedias, they can jazz up their
facts and figures with animations, video and sounds. Ask for National Anthems,
for example, and you can hear them played by the instrument of your choice
– or you can request video and see the flags flapping in the wind.

Expanded books work in a similar way. A pioneering series from Voyager
publishing allows you to read and hear works by modern poets while watching
videos of their readings on-screen. While you’re listening, you can switch
to notes about the poem or the poet. Microsoft’s Beethoven gives you the
score of the Ninth Symphony, along with the music, plus an animated history
of the composer and detailed descriptions of the instruments used in each
movement. And San Diego Zoo presents . . . The Animals! by Software Toolworks
has video footage and sounds for all the zoo’s animals and information about
their natural habitats.

Now to where the action is. Games on CD-ROM run the gamut from shoot-’em-ups,
soft porn and adaptations of hit movies to mysteries and traditional board
games. All make use of the CD-ROM’s potential to provide interactivity.
Many include video clips and high-quality 3-D animations instead of the
simple flat images you see with handheld games units and the games consoles
that you plug into the TV. The gigantic capacity of the CD-ROM allows hundreds
of different story lines to be provided within a single program, so as you
progress through an adventure you may be given a choice of actions which
determines what happens next. In Virgin’s 7th Guest, for example, you wander
round a haunted house at will, seeing different scenes in various rooms,
and accumulating the clues needed to find out the deepest secrets of the
evil owner.

More up-to-date in tone is Voyeur, published by Philips on CD-I, which
uses multiple story lines to build up a political thriller. In it you follow
the fortunes of an aspiring presidential candidate. Real actors play the
parts of the candidate and his family and have been integrated into computer
generated scenes – which explains why Voyeur is promoted as ‘the first
interactive movie’.

7th Guest and Voyeur both aim at an adult market with Voyeur earning
an 18 video rating in Britain. Other CD-ROMs in the zone where games meet
movies go further. In Virtual Valerie for Mac CD-ROM, the player coaxes
Valerie to take her clothes off. Some industry observers even believe that
interactive pornography could provide the purveyors of multimedia with their
biggest market.

Take care, however, before you buy any CD-ROM product. While large stores
now stock more than a hundred titles, many do not live up to the promise
of their glossy packaging. Some can be a nightmare to get running on your
computer. And video on CD-ROM can be disappointing on anything but the
fastest and most expensive machines.

That’s part of the reason why, in the long run, people may prefer to
download their multimedia applications from a network. The other reason
is that with many such applications the novelty soon wears off, and £40
is a lot to pay for a single evening’s entertainment. By connecting to high-speed
networks, computer users will have direct access to myriad multimedia applications
running on top-end computers. But these kinds of connections won’t happen
until the much talked about information superhighways are built.

Even with today’s relatively primitive network systems there is plenty
to be gained from investigating what’s on offer. All you need to get connected
to computer networks around the world is a modem to plug into the back of
your computer, a telephone line and some communications software to control
the whole shebang. Easily said; less easily done. Setting up a modem is
one of the trickier jobs in the realm of personal computers, and most manuals
appear to have been written by anoraks-from-hell. Some skilled help will
probably be essential.

When, by hook or by crook, your connection is up and running you will
want to find other people to communicate with. An instant source of gossip,
resources and information is offered by the various bulletin board systems.
In Britain, £25 will register you with the CIX bulletin board (its
full name, Compulink Information eXchange, is all but forgotten). You will
then be able to send electronic mail to anyone who has an e-mail address,
enter online conversations with other members of CIX, and receive information
on subjects ranging from aerosols to Zen Buddhism. While you are online
you will be clocking up a connection charge with CIX, which is £2.40
per hour off peak. CIX levies a minimum monthly charge of £6.25.

For a little more money you can log on to one of the information services
that provide access to specialised databases. CompuServe, for example, gives
access to medical, technical and business databases, as well as providing
an executive news service where you can view news stories direct from the
news agencies’ wires, or see online copies of newspapers such as The Washington
Post. Other well-known commercial databases include Dialog Information Retrieval
Service, Dow-Jones and Lexis-Nexis. But accessing these services is not
cheap – top rates go up to $2.00 a minute – and time flashes by as you
read newspapers online.

Then there is the famous Internet, a vast network of networks that connects
universities, research centres and businesses that are prepared to provide
free access to information. At the last count there were some 20 million
users worldwide, and the number is said to be growing at 10 per cent per
month. A connection to CompuServe or CIX will also provide you with a link
into the Internet. On the Net you can find discussion groups, log on to
computers at the other side of the world, send messages to any user, or
even join in interactive role-playing games.

The Net is so vast and labyrinthine that beginners always get lost –
even if they start out equipped with one of the many fat manuals touted
as a novice’s guide. So the past few months have seen the appearance of
graphical interfaces that you can use to plot your way round the Net simply
by selecting icons. Software like this should make the Internet somewhat
less forbidding.

Although there are already a million and one things to visit on the
networks, what’s on offer now is nothing to what is coming. At present,
most of the information you get is just plain old text. Some companies are
experimenting with video compression techniques for sending low-quality
images over the network. With computers from manufacturers such as Apple,
Sun Microsystems and computer graphics specialist Silicon Graphics you can
mount a video camera on your desktop machine and join a video conference
from you desk. So far, the quality of the images sent over the data networks
is restricted by their narrow bandwidth. But that will change as the superhighways
are built and there will be almost no limit on the amount of information
that can be poured into homes and businesses.

Time Warner, along with cable TV supplier MCI and Silicon Graphics’
will test video-on-demand in Orlando, Florida this year. People in the test
area will be supplied with a set-top computer that they will use to select
a feature film from a central store. Having chosen a film, they will see
it immediately start playing on their TV. In Britain, BT has a small-scale
test of video-on-demand running on ordinary telephone lines near Ipswich,
Suffolk. So far 70 homes of BT employees have the service, but by the end
of the year BT expects to have 2500 homes hooked into its video-on-demand
service.

Video-on-demand could be the advance guard of a range of interactive
services. Telecoms companies hope it will yield profits for them to invest
in services such as home shopping and home banking. Also expected soon are
personalised news services, which will allow subscribers to select the stock
prices they want to follow, the sports results they are interested in and
the news topics they want to be told about. Perhaps that, more than anything,
indicates the way things are going. Not just more information, but information
where you want it, when you want it, and tailored to your particular needs.