Although Moore’s Law might have enabled the age of PC-as-media-machine, it took an entirely new

class of peripherals—items such as PDAs, webcams, digital cameras and camcorders, MP3 players,

and snazzy cell phones—to make the age of media computing absolutely inevitable. Before the digital

camcorder, only folks like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had the resources and capability to edit

films on a computer. Today just about any PC users can make their own movies using Microsoft

Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, or any of a hundred other applications. These films can be

posted to a Web site, enclosed within an e-mail message, or even distributed on DVDs—with

cinema-quality images and full surround sound, making it increasingly easy to create “Hollywood”

movies at home