Another exotic finding was sighted!



The logo shows ULTIMEDIA which sounds weird (or maybe a contraction of ULTIMATE and MEDIA).
But it has more sense in its longer version: IBM ULTIMEDIA

It does have an IMDb entry.
And probably a reference book companion: https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/Q7KdugEACAAJ?hl=en
The company who designed the boxset still have a concept picture of it here.



L.A. Times gives hints that it was a PC software piloting a LD player used as picture/video storage I suppose:

The New World on a Disc : Computers: IBM is testing the waters for video-disc teaching by launching a multimedia history of Christopher Columbus.

But it had never been submitted to the database or discussed on this forum so far.

=> Columbus: Encounter, Discovery and Beyond (1992) [04G3748]

Julien

maybe these have been destroyed due to year one woke?

Cool looking box, seems kinda backward though. “Discovery” wasn’t really an easy issue at any point during the life of Laserdisc. It probably addresses this complexity and might even be predicated on it. It’s hard to say one decent thing about old CC. He didn’t discover anything and his actions fit anyone’s description of “evil”. This probably wasn’t a big seller.

Very cool. Video here:

With Darth Vader's voice, no less!

Julien

More information here:

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1991-11-11-1991315112-story.html

IBM PC 386SX (not Intel) dedicated to a Multimedia IBM PC called PS/2 Ultimedia Model 57 SLC.

The version we saw had external speakers and was attached to a Pioneer laser disk player. Its operating system was a pre-release version of OS/2 with special multimedia extensions.

US$6,000 for the PC, US$2,500 for the Columbus contents.
That could buy you a brand new HLD-X0 few years later!

Julien

That's about as expensive as the Domesday system was a few years earlier...

Did some Google Sleuthing and found this tidbit on the Art Directors Homepage https://www.double-bang.com/about/

David Hartwell is a Los Angeles based artist, photographer, animator and motion graphics artist.

David C. Hartwell is Swiss born and a subject of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. He moved to Los Angeles in 1991. He got his first job 8 hours after landing at LAX: night shift scanning thousands of images at Synapse Technologies for famed Tron SFX guru Robert Abel’s new brainchild: interactive multimedia. He rose through the ranks to become Art Director on their second title, “Evolution/Revolution” the sequel to “Columbus: Encounter, Discovery and Beyond”. Of Columbus, only three copies are known to still exist: one is in the Smithsonian Institution; another in the Library of Congress, and the only other known copy is in the IBM vault. Since then, he has art directed, designed and developed visualizations of technical and historical content for the likes of Disney, IBM, Microsoft, Discovery Channel, History Channel and PBS. 25 years later, armed with an arsenal of digital skills he is returning to his roots: photography and graphic design as tools of social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society."


Page 74 of this PDF seems to confirm its existence in the Smithsonian archives

https://sirismm.si.edu/EADpdfs/SIA.FA94-149.pdf

So more sleuthing suggests that the person who posted this video to YouTube and created the IMDB entry https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10021060/, Jenny Cool, was the writer, editor, and producer on this project.

It was funded by IBM to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus and to showcase their multimedia technology, though appears due to size and scope of the production it was never finished or released to the public or schools as the document here suggests https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3-euw1-ap-pe-ws4-cws-documents.ri-prod/9780415836944/Chapter%202.docx

Very interesting. I remember 1992 being one of those moments where half the country seemed to just then suddenly realize that the other half never bought into the predominant narrative of “discovery”. I’d guess a lot of schools, when faced with the choice between a part time teacher’s annual pay and...a super expensive multimedia extravaganza, let’s say, the choice was easy.

I don't think it really matters as to who discovered America and the islands surrounding us. If he wasn't there and it wasn't that time some else would be just as villainized for like columbus.
He was important to history and to all of us but to an extent that has been exaggerated over the years.

(Trimming the posts, the subject here is the IBM LD and technology around it, actual Columbus recognition in modern History is quite off-topic.)

Julien

Mao still wins as champion mass murder.