Computer Multimedia
Computers have come a long way very fast since there start in the 1940's. In
the beginning they were mainly used for keeping financial records by banks and
insurance companies, and for mathematical computations by engineers and the U.S.
Military.
However, exciting new applications have developed rapidly in the last few years.
Two of these areas is Computer Graphics and sound.
Computer graphics is the ability of the computer to display, store and transmit
visual information in the form of pictures. Currently there are two main uses
for this new ability. One is in the creation of Movies and the other in
Computer Games. Computer visual information is also increasingly being used in
other computer applications, such as photographic storage, and the Internet.
Computers can also store, transmit and play back sound.
When a picture or a sound is stored on a computer it said to be digitized.
There are two main ways of digitizing a picture. One is by vector graphics.
Here the information in the picture is stored as mathematical equations.
