With both the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show and the television bash in Las Vegas this week, multimedia is commandeering all the headlines, and US PC Week reckons it’s on the inside track on a confidential Microsoft Corp project to solve the technological problem of making full-length feature films available instantly to thousands of cable customers. The answers that AT&T Co and IBM Corp have come up with are described in page two today, but a Microsoft team organised under Rick Rashid, a 40-year-old former Carnegie Mellon University professor is working with huge capacity magnetic disks capable of storing hundreds of movies in compressed format. Also under development is an optical means of storing large amounts of data that will provide even faster access. Microsoft is of course also working with Intel Corp and General Instrument Corp to design a set-top cable television controller to be driven by a tailored version of Windows 3.
