William H. Gates Jr., chairman of the Microsoft Corp., wants to share his art collection with you, in your home; not the Leonardo da Vinci notebook he bought this month for $30.8 million, but 48 Impressionist and post-Impressionists for less than $25.
With Impressionists Collection, you can browse through the works of Cezanne, Monet, van Gogh and others, which look more like stained glass than canvas, or use them as screen savers. A Pissarro screen saver for Windows may seem a bit much, but it surely looks good. You almost hate to touch a key or move the mouse and make it disappear.
More catholic tastes? The Microsoft Art Gallery, a CD-ROM in both Windows and Macintosh versions, contains the collection of the National Gallery, London, all 2,000 works. Monet is here, too, but so are Titian and Rembrandt. There are animations $l demonstrating the techniques of the painters, biographies and odds and ends of fact and background. The disk sells for less than $60.
If you prefer pictures that move, Microsoft Cinemania '95 does not have them. But it does have about 900 stills, 150 spoken
lines, theme songs and other music in a guide and companion to tonight's video. The CD-ROM, for both Windows and Mac, is crammed with biographies, lists of Academy Award winners and nominees, reviews, two movie encyclopedias and much more.
Microsoft Cinemania '95 is less than $60.
These programs are part of the Microsoft Home series, which is yet another transformation of the personal computer into domestic appliance as perceived by industry leaders. The time may finally be here. It also may not be here.
The Home series is not limited to visual products. With a good sound card and speakers, as well as a double-speed or better CD-ROM drive, you can enjoy Multimedia Schubert: The Trout Quintet; Multimedia Strauss: Three Tone Poems; Multimedia Mozart: The Dissonant Quartet; Multimedia Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, and Multimedia Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony. These disks, all for Windows and each costing less than $60, do not sound like music played even on a middle-level stereo system, but the charts, spoken commentaries, scores and other aids add much.
It is not all high culture. Microsoft Arcade contains five classic arcade games (remember Asteroids?), The Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack is a collection of Windows games previously available separately. Creative Writer and Fine Artist, for children 8 and older, are writing/desktop publishing and graphic production programs, respectively. They are less than $50 and are available for both Windows and Macintosh. For the rest of us, Microsoft Works, 3.0 for Windows and 4.0 for the Macintosh, take care of most domestic needs for less than $100.