Multimedia electronic mail : will the dream become a reality ?

Multimedia mail is a very promising technology that has been crippled by a lack of standards. While the potential usefulness of the technology is enormous, that potential is unlikely to be realized until the power of multimedia mail is made available to a large enough community of potential users. I...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications of the ACM 1991-04, Vol.34 (4), p.117-119
Main Author: BORENSTEIN, N. S
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Advantages
Applied sciences
Computer programming
Electronic mail systems
Exact sciences and technology
Multimedia
Multimedia computer applications
Multimedia technology
Product development
Prototypes
Services and terminals of telecommunications
Systems, networks and services of telecommunications
Telecommunications
Telecommunications and information theory
Telematics
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Multimedia mail is a very promising technology that has been crippled by a lack of standards. While the potential usefulness of the technology is enormous, that potential is unlikely to be realized until the power of multimedia mail is made available to a large enough community of potential users. In the absence of a generally accepted standard, the bottom-up approach being pursued by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and others is probably the best hope for turning the dream of multimedia into reality. One of the benefits of this approach is that, at the cost of a small modification to the code in each mail-reading interface, there is no need to convince users to change their mail-reading habits. The approach also simplifies the burden of administering multimedia mail in a heterogeneous environment.
ISSN:0001-0782
1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/103085.103098