El cheapo multimedia: lights, camera, action - as shareware. (Software Review) (Column) (Evaluation)

Macworld, April, 1995 by Pogue, David

The Desktop Critic

Listen, when I was your age, we didn't have CD-ROM. We didn't have QuickTime movies. We didn't have self-running slide shows with thundering sound tracks. We had text files, and we were happy.

But Apple, much ridiculed when it first began hyping multimedia as the Next Big Thing, turns out to have been right. Today, even the feeblest computer Apple sells can crunch video as easily as numbers. And CD-ROM is so popular that you can't show your face at a cocktail party without knowing what Myst is.

Perhaps the biggest clue that multimedia has hit the mainstream, though, is that hundreds of sound, graphics, and video programs have appeared as shareware. When you can get a $15 shareware program that duplicates the features of...