
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, November 23, 1993                   TAG: 9311230050
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

NOW YOU CAN CONDUCT YOUR OWN INVESTIGATION

A new software company has started selling a program that allows ordinary people to closely examine films and documents from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Medio Multimedia Inc. rushed to finish the $60 compact disk program so it could be sold around Monday's 30th anniversary of the event.

Called "JFK Assassination: A Visual Investigation," the program contains four films of the shooting, including the famous Zapruder film; 850 pages of findings of the Warren Commission investigation; the text of "Crossfire," a book by conspiracy author Jim Marrs; and 22 precisely scaled animations that allow a person to assess different theories of bullet trajectories.

The product is an example of the growing power of multimedia CDs in personal computers. The disks hold hundreds of times more information than regular floppy disks, allowing better graphics, sound and video.

Author Gerald Posner used multimedia PCs for research and animation in writing his recently published book, "Case Closed," which concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only assassin.

The designers of "JFK Assassination: A Visual Investigation" said they tried to present an objective view.

"What we tried to do is compile information that was not easily available elsewhere," said Raphael Laderman, a New York software developer who created the program. "No where else you can find the Zapruder film with frames numbered in a way you can look back and forth."

He said he was conscious of the potential to create an exploitative product but, with the exception of the Zapruder film, there are no bloody scenes in the program.

"When people do watch it, they usually have the reaction, the gasp, they have whenever they see the Zapruder film. It is really horrifying," Laderman said. "It's a bit distasteful to have to look at it. On the other hand, it does tend to illuminate in a way you otherwise couldn't have."

Medio is not the first company to develop a computer CD on the Kennedy assassination.

LMP Systems, a Dallas company that creates electronic documents for courtroom use, has put the entire 12 volumes and 2,000 photographs of the House Select Committee's investigation onto a disk it sells for $250. The complete 26-volume Warren Commission report will be available in January.

by CNB