The word multimedia was coined to advertise a 1966 Long Island disco show
Long before CD-ROMs and streaming, multimedia described a nightclub act. The singer and artist Bob Goldstein used it in July 1966 to promote Lightworks at L'Oursin in Southampton, New York, a mix of music and visuals. Within weeks Variety had picked up the term, and it has shifted meaning ever since.
Goldstein, who later restyled himself Bobb Goldsteinn, may have been influenced by the artist Dick Higgins, who had written about a new approach to art he called intermedia. On 10 August 1966 Richard Albarino of Variety used the word to describe the Lightworks show as disco entertainment. In 1968 it was borrowed again for the work of political consultant David Sawyer, whose wife Iris had been one of Goldstein's producers.
By the late 1970s multimedia meant slide shows run on several projectors synchronised to a soundtrack. Its present meaning settled in the 1990s, when certain machines were marketed as multimedia computers thanks to better graphics and sound. Tay Vaughan's 1993 book Multimedia: Making It Work shipped with software descended from a 1985 DOS program that the Smithsonian called one of the first, if not the first, multimedia authoring systems. In Germany the word was named Word of the Year in 1995.
Today the term describes communication that mixes content forms, in contrast to older mass media such as print or audio recordings that used only one. The five core building blocks are text, images, audio, video and animation, and a sixth, content generated by algorithms or artificial intelligence, has been added. Examples include video podcasts, audio slideshows and animated explainers. Early on, rich media was a synonym for interactive multimedia; later, web hypermedia and streaming carried it online.
Almost every modern gadget now qualifies. Smartphones, game consoles and computers each have a main job but also record video, play music, display text and run games, which is why they are called multimedia devices. Designers use multimedia in education and training because combined media help audiences retain information, and in games and simulations ranging from offline consoles to virtual and augmented reality.
Source: Multimedia
