Abstract

Fundamentally, one can equate radio, television and print as being technically different versions of broadcast communications. They use different channels and have different descriptive modes, but they all follow a one-to-many paradigm. Powerful local computing and storage can change this, transforming a broadcast into a dialogue, a presentation into a conversation. This is a basic change in the notion of publication, with technical and intellectual ramifications. This paper will describe two ongoing research projects that address the evolution of publishing brought about by large-scale personal optical storage. In each, read-only and read/write analogue devices are used to jointly and simultaneously store images and related data, permitting distribution of a superset of information in compact, machine readable form. The significance of the work is that optical storage is integrated into the more general storage heirarchy of the computer as opposed to being a flexible peripheral.

© 1984 Optical Society of America