Bob Stein and Voyager: The Overlooked Pioneers of Interactive Digital Media
By
doppp
Crackling crust, pillowy middle. The kind of bagel that earns a second cup of coffee.
Summary
This article profiles Bob Stein and his pioneering multimedia company Voyager, which created some of the earliest and most innovative CD-ROM titles in the late 1980s and 1990s. Voyager bridged the worlds of publishing, film, education, and technology, producing interactive "expanded books" and film analysis tools like the Criterion Collection laserdiscs. Despite its outsized influence on digital media, the company remained an outlier that didn't fit neatly into any industry category. The piece explores Stein's vision, Voyager's groundbreaking work, and why the company has been largely overlooked in historical surveys of the digital revolution.
Key quotes
· 2 pulledVoyager tends to be overlooked in almost every survey because we didn't really fit into anybody's category. Librarians didn't really pay much attention. The computer world never cared. Hollywood never really cared. We touched all these industries, but because we weren't central to any of them and didn't really ally with any of them in particular, we were in fact always an outlier.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, an advisor to the American government on the subjects of engineering and technology, published his landmark essay 'As We May Think,' which proposed using a hypothet
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