• 作者： 陳耀宗; 蔡其嘩; 郭俊賢
• 作者服務機構： 交通大學資訊工程系
• 中文摘要： 隨著電腦與資訊的整合，多媒體的應用已成為九零年代資訊科技的趨勢。所謂的電子郵件已經被使用了二十餘年。近年來，電子郵件逐漸趨向多媒體化。在本文中，我們研討一個多媒體電子郵件系統－Merlin。此系統建構在X視窗上，它包括三個子系統一多媒體郵件編輯子系統、使用者介面子系統以及郵件收發子系統。編輯子系統提供了所有以多媒體格式編輯郵件的必要功能包括文字、圖形、聲音和影像資料；使用者介面子系統改進了現有電子郵件的介面，使用者能更容易地編輯多媒體形式的郵件（包括傳統文字）；郵件收發子系統也增加了傳統電子郵件所沒有的自動壓縮／解壓縮和編碼／解碼的功能。在這三個子系統所提到的所有功能均是完整而可行的。Merlin目前安裝在執行UNIX和X11/R5的網路環境下。
• 英文摘要： Along with the integration of computers and communications, multimedia applications have become animportant trend in information technology in the 1990s. So-called electronic mail, or e-mail, has been in use formore than two decades. In recent years, steps have been taken toward developing multimedia e-mail systems. Inthis article, we discuss a multimedia electronic mail system-Merlin. The system, which is based on X-window,consists of three subsystems: a multimedia mail editor subsystem, a mail user interface subsystem, and a deliver/receive subsystem. The editor subsystem provides all the necessary functions for editing mail documents in multimediaformat, which includes text, graphics, audio, and images. The user interface subsystem enhances the existing e-mail interface so that users can easily manipulate different types of multimedia mail, including traditional text mail.The deliver/receive subsystem is also an improved version of the conventional e-mail system, with automaticcompression/decompression and encoding/decoding. All the functions in the three subsystems are complete andworking. Merlin is currently installed on a network environment running UNIX and X11/R5.
• 中文關鍵字： e-mail; nultimedia; X-window; compression; encoding
• 英文關鍵字： --