3. Books, Keys and Gardens page 1

Gazing on distant vistas of some time and land where man and multimedia live happily (no doubt amongst electric sheep) is all very well, but how would a system like the Living Garden actually work?

The sequence of illustrations indicate the basic functional outline of how the Living Garden records and replays messages. In this example, as the diagram shows, an individual records a few words, perhaps a line of poetry, as a message intended for someone else. The message - which once recorded is described as a Living Book - is stored on a remote multimedia database from which, at a later point, it may eventually be recalled and replayed within a Living Garden visited by the person the message was created for.

Living Books

A Living Book is simply the generic name given to any discrete message which the Living Garden is designed to hold and deliver. The purpose of any message is up to the author, but the system can deal with anything from a short sound recording (words or music), to an image or series of images (photographs, pictures, colours even) or a more complex mix of things.

In the example illustrated, the Living Book in question is purely the recording of the spoken love poem. As show in Figure 1 the creator (the author) of this Living Book simply records their spoken words via an `authoring tool' (something rather like a telephone or microphone in this case), words which are digitised and transmitted via fibre optic cables onto a remote centralised multimedia database. As the message is being stored as a `file' on the database, a unique database reference number is generated for this record. This number is immediately transmitted back to the authoring tool where it is recorded on a removable device - analogous to a cash card - called the Key (see Figure 2) . The whole process takes only a few fractions of a second.

The role of the Key

Two main roles are served by the Key. First, for as long as it remains in their possession, the Key provides the means by which an author retains control and access over any message which they have created. The Key's second role is to provide the instrument via which memories can, literally, be passed on from one person to another. As illustrated in Figure 3 , having created a message (a Living Book), an author simply hands over the relevant Key to the intended recipient, who may then visit a garden to unlock the message intended for them. It is important to be clear that the Key, itself, stores only the reference number of a message - rather than a copy of the actual recording. This means that the Key's memory requirements are minuscule (a few bytes of information) and that it can be made from a core memory device based around a very small passive semiconductor which - like a cash card - can record a unique PIN number magnetically, without needing any additional power supply.