Rich media or multimedia is a recent phenomenon in the digital sense, but its roots stem back to the ancient campfires where our ancestors used sound and visual elements to share information, ideas and stories. In the past 25 years I’ve witnessed some major developments and advances I’d like to share.

First, it’s important to distinguish lean-back vs. lean-forward media. The former is passive (radio, television, movies, etc.) and the latter is active where the user is engaged throughout, making choices, navigating, even responding and adding to the overall conversation.

Second, it takes four conditions to generate rich media: a delivery platform, content creation tools, a content author and, most importantly, an audience.

This really happened for the first time around 1987 when Apple introduced the Macintosh with its graphical user interface, and HyperCard, the first universal multimedia tool. Teachers embraced HyperCard as a way to create “stacks” with text, audio and graphics – no video yet – to convey lessons to their students. They could easily save and distribute these stacks on floppy disks.

In the years that followed, black and white gave way to color, floppies gave way to CDs and Apple gave way to Microsoft, at least as a delivery platform, when Windows became the global standard in GUI computing. And when Microsoft introduced Windows 95, many of the obstacles that had hindered media creation and delivery on prior versions of Windows disappeared.

During this time, Macromedia owned the multimedia space with its Director and Authorware tools. The former was used to create nearly every consumer interactive CD, and the latter was the industry standard for computer-based training. Adobe, with Photoshop and Illustrator, and Apple, with Quicktime video tools, were also key tool providers.

Around this same 1995 timeframe, the World Wide Web arrived. For rich media, the Web was a huge step forward in that it instantaneously linked our audience on one common platform, eliminating the need for CDs, but it was comparatively primitive with limited graphics, animation and video capabilities.

To overcome this, Macromedia acquired a product it later renamed Flash, a nimble authoring tool and browser plug-in that provided a user experience similar to that of Director. Today, tools like Flash, along with other Web technologies have given rise to sites like YouTube, Facebook, Hulu and others. With the emerging media power of HTML5 plus the battery and stability needs of mobile platforms, some wonder if Flash is necessary anymore. Personally, I’m confident it will remain viable as an authoring tool, even if the plug-in potentially fades away.

The bottom line with rich media – and it harkens back to those ancient campfires – is that platforms and tools may change, but we remain the same. We continue to feed our hunger to understand, to connect and share ideas, and we use rich media as a channel to do this.

And for that reason alone, we will continue to keep leaning in.