CD-ROM in the context of "Digital poetry"

Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,000 entries in 2256 pages, as well as 2400 illustrations. The CD-ROM version in 1994 also included 120,000 spoken pronunciations.

New media are communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users, as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for the influx of interactive CD-ROMs for entertainment and education. The new media technologies, sometimes known as Web 2.0, include a wide range of web-related communication tools such as blogs, wikis, online social networking, virtual worlds, and other social media platforms.

The phrase "new media" refers to computational media that share material online and through computers. New media inspire new ways of thinking about older media. Media do not replace one another in a clear, linear succession, instead evolving in a more complicated network of interconnected feedback loops . What is different about new media is how they specifically refashion traditional media and how older media refashion themselves to meet the challenges of new media.

Electronic media are media that use electronics or electromechanical means for the audience to access the content. This is in contrast to static media (mainly print media), which today are most often created digitally, but do not require electronics to be accessed by the end user in the printed form. The primary electronic media sources familiar to the general public are video recordings, audio recordings, multimedia presentations, slide presentations, CD-ROM and online content. Most new media are in the form of digital media. However, electronic media may be in either analogue electronics data or digital electronic data format.

Although the term is usually associated with content recorded on a storage medium, recordings are not required for live broadcasting and online networking.

The 1990s (often referred and shortened to as "the '90s" or "the Nineties") was the decade that began on 1 January 1990, and ended on 31 December 1999. Known as the "post-Cold War decade", the 1990s were culturally imagined as the period from the Revolutions of 1989 until the September 11 attacks in 2001. The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the end of Russia's status as a superpower, the end of a multipolar world, and the rise of anti-Western sentiment. China was still recovering from a politically and economically turbulent period. This allowed the US to emerge as the world's sole superpower, creating relative peace and prosperity for many western countries. During this decade, the world population grew from 5.3 to 6.1 billion.

The decade saw greater attention to multiculturalism and advance of alternative media. Public education about safe sex curbed HIV in developed countries. Generation X bonded over musical tastes. Humor in television and film was marked by ironic self-references mixed with popular culture references. Alternative music movements like grunge, reggaeton, Eurodance, K-pop, and hip-hop, became popular, aided by the rise in satellite and cable television, and the internet. New music genres such as drum and bass, post-rock, happy hardcore, denpa, and trance emerged. Video game popularity exploded due to the development of CD-ROM supported 3D computer graphics on platforms such as Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and PCs.

The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and is capable of holding uncompressed stereo audio. First released in Japan in October 1982, the CD was the second optical disc format to reach the market, following the larger LaserDisc (LD). In later years, the technology was adapted for computer data storage as CD-ROM and subsequently expanded into various writable and multimedia formats. As of 2007, over 200 billion CDs (including audio CDs, CD-ROMs, and CD-Rs) had been sold worldwide.

Standard CDs have a diameter of 120 millimetres (4.7 inches) and typically hold up to 74 minutes of audio or approximately 650 MiB (681,574,400 bytes) of data. This was later regularly extended to 80 minutes or 700 MiB (734,003,200 bytes) by reducing the spacing between data tracks, with some discs unofficially reaching up to 99 minutes or 870 MiB (912,261,120 bytes) which falls outside established specifications. Smaller variants, such as the Mini CD, range from 60 to 80 millimetres (2.4 to 3.1 in) in diameter and have been used for CD singles or distributing device drivers and software.

The Lexikon des Mittelalters (lit. 'Lexicon of the Middle Ages'; LMA or LexMA) is a German encyclopedia on the history and culture of the Middle Ages. Written by authors from all over the world, it comprises more than 36,000 articles in 9 volumes. Historically the works range from Late Antiquity to about 1500, covering the Byzantine Empire and the Arab world .

The first six volumes were published by Artemis (later Artemis & Winkler), Munich and Zürich; volumes seven through nine by LexMA, Munich. In 2000, an electronic (standalone) edition of the Lexikon was published on CD-ROM by Brepols.