At this time, the Parachute Design Guide officially sanctioned by the AIAA was a small, 150-page book. Based on our experience with Sandia National Labs, the association requested that we examine the potential for a hypertext version of their design guide.

We created sample chapters in Toolbook and compared them to similar chapters in the traditional book.

Positives

(1) Access to specific topics was sometimes enhanced.

(2) Occasional videos and more images at high quality were possible.

Negatives

(1) A CD-ROM is far too small to contain all of the components we hoped to add, and without those new components, there seemed to be little reason to change media.

(2) Burning CDs at that time was slow and inconsistent, and publishing CDs was exceptionally expensive for runs of only a few hundred.

Conclusions

The technologies seemed promising, but were still too immature for this application at this time.

Publication

1993 Conference of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.

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