Robert Stein (born April 20, 1946) founded

The Voyager Company The Voyager Company was a pioneer in CD-ROM production in the 1980s and early 1990s. In partnership with Janus Films, the company published The Criterion Collection, a pioneering home video collection of classic and important contemporary films on ...

in 1985, the first commercial

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both com ...

publisher, and

The Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home video, home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films." Criterion serves film and media scho ...

in 1984, a collection of definitive films on

digital media Digital media is any communication media that operate in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronics device. ...

with in-depth background information (including the first films with recorded

audio commentary An audio commentary is an additional audio track, usually digital, consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with a video. Commentaries can be serious or entertaining in nature, and can add informatio ...

). Born and raised in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, Stein attended

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, majoring in

psychology Psychology is the science, scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immens ...

. Later, he earned a master's degree in

education Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...

from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

. Stein then worked with

Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) d ...

at the

Atari Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc., founded in Sunnyvale, Ca ...

Research Group on various electronic publishing projects. After Voyager, Stein founde
Night Kitchen
to develop authoring tools for experimental electronic publishing, primaril
TK3
Stein is the director of the

Institute for the Future of the Book An institute is an organisational body created for a certain purpose. They are often research organisations (research institutes) created to do research on specific topics, or can also be a professional body. In some countries, institutes can ...

. According to Stein: "The Institute has two principal activities. One is building high-end tools for making complex electronic documents (part of the

Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pit ...

's higher-ed digital infrastructure initiative). The other is exploring and hopefully influencing the evolution of new forms of intellectual expression and discourse." This new scholarly direction is being explored under the umbrella of MediaCommons. In 2019 Stein donated his archival papers and hard drives to Stanford University.Stanford University, Special Collections, Accessions 2019-472, 2020-017 and 2020-060
Website Stanford University, Special Collections
/ref>

External links

Bob Stein on the unrecorded history of online publishing
Triple Canopy, July 2010
Robert Stein by John Brockman

August 2005

Wired Magazine, July 1996
The Institute for the Future of the Book

if:book
the Institute for the Future of the Book weblog
"Becoming Book-Like: Bob Stein and the Future of the Book"
(Interview)
MediaCommons

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stein, Robert 1946 births Living people Columbia University alumni Harvard Graduate School of Education alumni American company founders