CompuServe Messages

Of course, the real deal is that no one knows how well these things will be accepted. Lots has been written about this. Here's a quote from the 1988 "CD-I: A Designer's Overview" from McGraw-Hill ISBN 0-07-049816-4 … DO CONSUMERS WANT INTERACTIVE PROGRAMS? "Some observers have remarked that consumers do not want to interact with their TV sets. Are they right? We do not know yet. Although a clear case for interactivity can be made in the training and education markets, nothing quite like CD-I has ever been offered consumers before, and no body of research exists to supply us with an answer. The best market feedback on which to base conjecture is the experience with video games and home computers. For a short period video games were phenominally successful but, limited to 'shoot em up' games with primitve graphics, they proved a passing fad [Oh yeah? My note]. The early home computers also failed to live up to consumers' expectations and quickly joined the video games at the back of the closet. "Were these marketing disasters a fair test of the viability of interactvity in the home? Hardly: it was too much to expect simple video games to have any lasting value, and the software produced for the early home computers was limited by the inadequate processing power and data storage capabilities of the hardware, and the crudity of their visual displays. <continued>