LaserDisc was a seriously impressive technology, or at least it impressed me as a kid. My school had the (vanishingly rare) Apple Visual Almanac and some other educational LD titles that controlled the player from HyperCard. You could use a LaserActive with the Computer Interface PAC for this purpose, or you could use several other devices because there was an industry-standard serial command protocol. The Visual Almanac came with a book, floppies, a CD-ROM disc, and the LD discs, all of which were required, so it was probably the pinnacle of "multimedia" taken literally.
Wow! That is very cool. I'd love to see a more detailed write up or video about that system. I really miss that era of multimedia. So much of it seems hokey and awkward in retrospect but I feel like there are lots of unfinished thoughts and experiments in that realm that are only starting to be revisited now in the AR/VR/experiential context.
I thought my elementary school was pretty baller (it wasn't -- especially in comparison!) because its library had an LD player which got pulled out once or a year to show the same space race video -- complete with frame indexing and crystal clear frames on pause. Until I bought one for myself in the 2010s, that was only one of two times I saw LD players in the wild.
