When you strip away the luster, novelty, and excitement surrounding the newest generation of computer software – multimedia software on CD-ROM – you find a world not of high-tech efficiency but of simple human muddling. This is what Fred Moody discovered when he spent more than a year shadowing a team of Microsoft developers working in the epicenter of the multimedia explosion – on a children's compact disc to be called Explorapedia.
Observing every step of its creation, from the corporate meeting where Bill Gates and his managers singled out multimedia as the only hope for Microsoft to maintain its blistering growth, to the endlessly frustrating design process where artists and programmers, educators and marketers battled one another over the vision and reality of what Explorapedia could be, Fred Moody became the team's confidant, sounding board, and chronicler.
Creating this new medium, Moody shows, required skills the team lacked but had to acquire. Watching team members struggle to achieve in their software the perfect blend of technical innovation, artistic charm, and educational content offers an unforgettable lesson in what it takes to manage the exhilarating and turbulent process of turning a computer into a multimedia art machine.