I Miss Microsoft Encarta

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/IMissMicrosoftEncarta.aspx

by zdw • 7 years ago

1198 406 7 years ago

Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.)

That said, nostalgia is fun sometimes.

antognini• 7 years ago

Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways.

Ah, but does Wikipedia + Google have MindMaze?

NikolaNovak2• 7 years ago

I'm sorry, this is just incorrect by somebody who either hadn't fully used Encarta / Compton's, or doesn't remember them.

I have been looking for 5+ years for a tablet or PC "Atlas" which can easily, with a click of button, show me graphs, or colour regions, based on specified criteria such as political types; economy; climate; productivity; and other interesting stats.

Wikipedia articles are horribly inconsistent about format and details they use for different geographic regions. They are even worse at showing overviews, especially across categories and regions. It takes me hours to gather info I'd get in Encarta in a few clicks, at which point I give up. Google Maps doesn't have any of these markings / mappings easily accessible; and neither is trivially accessible offline.

This is not to say Google Maps and Wikipedia aren't AWESOME - because they are; and I wouldn't dream of replacing them with Encarta for 99% of things. But there are significant use cases which have been lost and not replaced with anything of equal ease of use.

FWIW: I'd pay $50+ right now for a good off-line atlas. All I can find in app stores when I search for "Atlas" is scans of maps :S

ghaff3• 7 years ago

There is Brittanica Online if you want an edited encyclopedia. And Rand McNally has an online atlas--though I don't have any personal familiarity with it. There's also ESRI.

mey• 7 years ago

You can download the CIA World Factbook, but it isn't an app, nor does search work offline. It is basically a scrape of the site.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/

CamperBob2• 7 years ago

Seems like Google Earth is a better match for your interests than Google Maps. I don't know if it's still actively maintained, though... you don't hear much about Google Earth anymore. Not new and shiny and disruptive enough, I guess.

daveslash2• 7 years ago

A huge portion of Wikipedia data is from the CIA's World Fact Book, which is public information. I wonder if combining that with a 3D rendering of the globe could be a viable product...

darkhorn• 7 years ago

Closest thing might be Wolfram Alpha.

basch• 7 years ago

One thing nicer about Encarta than Google+Wikipedia was for the most part being able to skip past the "is this trustworthy" step. Critical thinking is important, but the need for defaulting to distrust was less.

pastage2• 7 years ago

Even as a young teen in the eighties I never understood that part of maps, they are so shallow and prone to bias. Even just creating a map with only on the ground facts is always biased, there is always bad editorialization.

I never used Encarta, so it might be great, but you can get better data today at the cost of being harder to use. But a lot less bias.

That said maps are cool, and they are still really expensive, even with http://openstreetmap.org and https://www.naturalearthdata.com

com2kid2• 7 years ago

The content on Wikipedia far exceeds what Encarta had available of course, but Encarta was made during the height of the multimedia boom and features rich interactive media and educational narratives.

That entire time period is full of lost multimedia gems. From cooking CDs that had vetted recipes taught by professional chefs, to the Microsoft Wine Guide![1]

Sure now days all of that information is available on the web, but people have to sort through 90% garbage to find the good stuff. The number of recipes on the web put out by people who just don't even know how to cook is astounding.

There is something to be said for high quality curated experiences, and that is what those multimedia CD-ROMs offered.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzpNT8wAD3A

groundlogic2• 7 years ago

I certainly agree on the benefits of curation.

Using google was awesome before SEO.

I never really used Encarta deeply - I bought my Misumi CD-ROM reader in like 1994, without a bundle.

ghaff3• 7 years ago

Yeah, as the article alludes to, Encarta was a product of the period after CDs came out but before there was much of a WWW, before most people had an Internet connection, and what home connections existed were mostly dial-up modems.

As a result, it was hard not to be in a bit of awe at how much information of various types you could suddenly have at home in the form of little silvery disks.

momokoko• 7 years ago

I would strongly disagree in this case. Wikipedia can be very opinionated and holds bias towards fringe information that has a niche passionate base of followers.

Google provides very shallow info and bites that give rise to information that is clever as opposed to well thought out.

I do not want to infer that they are bad resources, but I would argue that they are significantly lacking in the department of balanced, curated and well thought out information.

asdfman1233• 7 years ago

For a kid growing up, Encarta was far superior to anything Wikipedia offers today.

Sure, Wikipedia wins in sheer volume but that's it. Encarta was a well curated collection of knowledge that was consistent and perfectly suited for its audience.

More is not always better.

pastage2• 7 years ago

When it comes to knowledge and data more is by definition always better.

jszymborski2• 7 years ago

Undoubtedly there is a healthy dose of nostalgia, however there's a lot to learn here.

Wikipedia is unbeatable for breadth and depth, but there's a lot to be said for curation.

partiallypro• 7 years ago

No offense, but I don't think you ever used Encarta, at least not much.

Encarta was much more interactive, even including 3D walk arounds of historical sites & quizzes.

wpietri• 7 years ago

Yeah, "I really miss the era where we were so deprived that now-small things seemed amazing" is a bit of a weird take.

I mean, I have plenty of my own tech nostalgia, like the way at 300 baud you could hear the bits and practically whistle them. Happy memories! But I try never to confuse that with "my childhood was a historical peak". Because it wasn't particularly.

You know plenty of people were just as nostalgic for their encyclopedia volumes and thought kids had it too easy with this CD-ROM nonsense. And I'm sure that people complained that the first encyclopedias made learning too easy, that kids wouldn't value what they didn't work for. And this is a tradition of "the kids are too soft" that goes back at least to Socrates: "[Writing things down] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own."

liability• 7 years ago

"Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways"

Excluding grammar and style maybe. A lot of Wikipedia, including many articles on important subjects, are painful to read. Either because they were written by committee or simply by somebody with poor language skills (sometimes even worse than my own!)

type0• 7 years ago

and sometimes even by bots

pushpop3• 7 years ago

Also Encarta was much more engaging. It wasn’t just a mass of text with a few token images thrown in. It was a carefully curated compilation of multimedia, interactive content, educational games as well as textual write ups. It’s content was also discoverable in a plethora of ways that the web should ideally be suited to yet Wikipedia doesn’t even begin to approach.

Sure, Wikipedia has more articles; but the content is of a significantly lower quality by every other standard going.

rtkwe2• 7 years ago

Not purely. Things like the timeline shown near the bottom don't really exist as far as I can tell on Wikipedia. Also the many writers few editors leads to articles feeling rather disjointed at times with information being repeated pointlessly in different ways in different sections sometimes, there's something to be said for the edited entries of yore in that regard.

I think it'd be really neat and useful for wikipedia to add things like that. A filterable searchable timeline to say "show me all the wars fought in or involving country X" or a map with layers showing different information or events.

cosmodisk• 7 years ago

Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bend the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable.

hk__24• 7 years ago

Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bent the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable.

What make you think Wikipedia would be more prone to these problems than other encyclopedia, including Encarta? Research has shown that the quality of Wikipedia is comparable to other encyclopedias, which might surprise some people given that anyone can edit it. Encarta will never have specialist in all domains known on Earth; something that Wikipedia can have.

shanselman• 7 years ago

I included the developing world stuff because it’s true. I’ve lived all over the African continent and no, not everyone is connected always. Sometimes there’s just an old PC in a room, disconnected. My mother in law taught in lower Gweru and they have no internet. What little digital work is done is moved on USB sticks. Encarta is used all over Cuba, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Spooky23• 7 years ago

I'd disagree. Encarta had different, almost magazine-like ways to present information. Google has too many blind alleys these days, and Wikipedia is very inconsistent.

Wikipedia is great, until you need to explain to children how to weigh the credibility of the information provided.

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

I cam here to say similar, although I'd phrase it as "Encarta was amazing in the 90's, but with Wikipedia you get a much richer and in depth encyclopedia, albeit without the interactive/multimedia type interface that kids might prefer".

I'd also say that a monthly dump of Wikipedia to DVD/BluRay/USB would meet the offline requirements. Or as you say mobile phone internet access (for low bandwidth ... is WAP still a thing?)

GordonS3• 7 years ago

I was going to submit this earlier today, but I thought "nah, nobody else on HN is going to be old enough to remember Encarta" :)

I remember when our family first got Encarta, and I spent hour after hour reading and marvelling about how all this information could be so easily accessible! I think we had a 14k dial-up Internet connection at the time, and the web was barely getting started - I really had no idea how things would turn out!

curiousgal• 7 years ago

I am 24 and very much remember it! Simpler days!

jszymborski2• 7 years ago

26 here... I think Encarta was one of the first CD-ROMS we owned (Compton was later, er, acquired surreptitiously).

I still remember the joy I had researching the Stegosaurus and the Platypus between my local library and my copy of Encarta for a school project <3.

asdfman1233• 7 years ago

Are you kidding me? Encarta was the bomb. As a kid, in the days before the computer was an endless source of information and distraction, I would just browse Encarta and learn random stuff.

Once some kid in my third grade class asked why race cars made noise they do when they passed, the teacher didn't give a satisfactory answer, and I was able to explain the Doppler effect to them based on animation I watched on Encarta.

Good stuff.

NikolaNovak2• 7 years ago

Oh no, I've been looking for "modern Encarta" for years, in particular something that would easily show me different regions coloured by statistics and criteria - the ability to pick part of the earth, and then colour selected regions by economy, or productivity, or politics, or whatever, was phenomenal. Tablets _should_ be such a natural device for an educational geography product; but with free Google Maps + Wikipedia, nobody seems to be trying (at least I cannot find anything useful in my once-yearly attempts).

mikeyouse• 7 years ago

CIA World Factbook is fairly close from a data perspective but not super user friendly or polished:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world...

(Enable Flash to make it slightly less cumbersome)

tasogare2• 7 years ago

This is something I plan to work on after getting my PhD in a few years. It's technically challenging, but there is so much things to do pedagogically around historical & linguistics maps on the globe.

tripzilch3• 7 years ago

Isn't GapMinder sort of what you're looking for? https://www.gapminder.org/tools/

throwaway156503• 7 years ago

Consider sharing this sort of content anyway! Even for younger audiences, it's really cool to be exposed to new-to-you things.

52-6F-62• 7 years ago

Oh I remember it well and fondly!

There was all of one or two internet providers in our county where I grew up at that time. Maybe one. We couldn’t afford it yet but my parents bought Encarta because it seemed like a wholesome tract for computer use.

I spent countless hours on there and used it for a ton of homework. IIRC my parents used it all the time as well. They likely still have the disks kicking around someplace.

vanderZwan2• 7 years ago

Are you kidding me? The only way hearing the opening screen again[0] could evoke more warm fuzzy nostalgia with me is if at the end it would crossfade into Baba Yetu from Civ IV's main menu screen[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e0Qelqp-Cc

mxfh• 7 years ago

Though Encarta evokes a bit more of Civ VI Sogno di Volare to me, but I share the sentiment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQYN2P3E06s

Besides Encarta, the mid 90s where also the time where I was first able to buy satellite imagery on CR-ROM for all of Germany from my collected lunch money and years before Microsoft's TerraServer changed the world, which itself was long before Google Maps took over.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8q89q4/microsofts-terrase...

somebodythere• 7 years ago

The MindMaze[1] music takes me back. I spent three-digits hours on that game as a little kid.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT-VbFcck6A

cabaalis2• 7 years ago

Did anyone else play with the gravity simulations to try to send the moon flying around like crazy?

dtech2• 7 years ago

Given that Encarta was the bomb in the late 90's and early 00's and the 25-35 age group is well represented on HN I'd say Encarta i prime HN nostalgia material.

GordonS3• 7 years ago

TBH, didn't realise it was still a thing in the early 00's!

gnulinux2• 7 years ago

22 here and I remember Encarta very fondly. I did not use it very often as back then paperback encyclopedias were still a "thing" and Wikipedia was pretty ok too; but I definitely reading about random physicists in Encarta. It was fun!

GordonS3• 7 years ago

Huh, I'm almost 40, really didn't realise Encarta had still a thing for people who are now in their early 20's!

atonse• 7 years ago

Not Encarta but I remember a CD ROM we got about the San Diego Zoo with our Packard Bell computer in 1994.

Boy, my brother and I learned too much about Aardvarks (because they were the first item on the list).

daveslash2• 7 years ago

I had access to Encarta on my grandparents' computer when it came bundled with their Windows 95 computer, but in my home I had Undersea Adventure, which came bundled with our Win 3.1 machine. Man, I learned a lot about sharks and nudibranchs.

paxys• 7 years ago

Nostalgia is a beautiful thing. Encarta was freaking magic back in the day, but I'm certain that if I or Hanselman or anyone else were forced to use it exclusively today they would throw the computer out of the window in frustration.

michaelvoz• 7 years ago

Encarta had a time and place when I, as a child, had access to disks and wikipedia did not exist yet. What is the point today? Vastly inferior in terms of content by volume, controlled by a single corporation with black box changes to articles (as opposed to Wikipedia's history tracking), impossible to dynamically update after release... I could go on.

Edit: I absolutely cannot stand the smarmy "I wrote code that you use" on his homepage. Sorry buddy, you probably don't.

octosphere• 7 years ago

There's a few copies of Encarta lying around on Archive.org if anyone is interested in getting a copy:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=encarta&and[]=mediatype...

wilsonrocks• 7 years ago

I remember moving schools at age 12 and the computers in the library had encarta. My friends had PCs with CDROMs and could print out Encarta for homework where I was stuck copying stuff out from a paper encyclopedia. Memories!

fsiefken• 7 years ago

There also was the Encyclopedia Brittanica, not sure how it compares to Encarta. I remember getting it on DVD or CD and choosing it instead of Encarta. No idea where it went. I'm not sure if the information is better or more complete then an offline Wikipedia dump combined with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

jhallenworld• 7 years ago

I preferred the Brittanica and thought Encarta was written for 10 year olds. I remember the technology was weird, like the articles were pdfs embedded in the web browser or something like that.

gxqoz• 7 years ago

I still regularly use the DVD version of Brittanica (it's good for looking things up on planes when I don't have internet connections and is a supplement to offline versions of Wikipedia). The quality is certainly better than Encarta which was based on a more cut-rate competitor to Brittanica.

potta_coffee• 7 years ago

Brittanica was the king of encyclopedias at that time, as far as I can remember. I had a set of those, and I remember comparing and finding other sets to be less good. I was pretty young but I spent a TON of time with them. I don't have experience with the Brittanica CDs but my guess is the content was of similar quality.

ptest1• 7 years ago

This harkens me back to the era of random publicity “multimedia” CD-ROMs. I remember being /thrilled/ that I got a free CD-ROM from Toyota!

Before websites were really a thing, having your own multimedia CD-ROM to give out was some kind of status symbol!

ChuckMcM5• 7 years ago

I miss it as well, as the author points out it isn't large and is easily contained on a thumbnail flash drive (several times over!).

I've started creating an offline reference library[1] because I see that search engines will be over whelmed with crap and frankly I don't want to have to find cell service to ask my handheld device to locate a factoid.

If you've read that now more than 50% of Google desktop searches don't result in a click, it is because Google is getting better at 'one boxing' the answer so you don't need to click through to read it.

[1] That project started by digitizing my referenced by less often used text books. Which lead to me digitizing text books for others as well. After Google's win on digitizing books is fair use for air cover much of the work applies NLP and a bit of machine learning to pull out facts which are not, in themselves copyrightable.

[2] "Google Wins Copyright Suit" --- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/04/18...

dman2• 7 years ago

How do I get a peek into this world according to Chuck slice of cyberspace?

ChuckMcM5• 7 years ago

An interesting question that I have yet to have a good answer for. The fair use exemption was pretty good air cover for using the digitized data, but text book publishers are rather litigious bunch. Not a bear I want to poke just yet.

shortformblog4• 7 years ago

This sounds amazing. I know it’s a personal project, but you should seriously share it with more people at some point.

ChuckMcM5• 7 years ago

The idea came from the fact that I wanted to play with the NLP work and wanted more useful data sets to start from (parsing Shakespeare gets old :-). And the fact that my fairly simple search engine for PDFs was basically just a classic n-tuple index into the word clouds minus stop words and gave good recall (like the old AltaVista) but not good precision.

Another comment in this thread about having a tablet to do that suggests an interesting way to deploy something like this on inexpensive table hardware with a somewhat more bespoke (aka performant) OS and application architecture for appliance type operation. (think running a unikernel rather than a general purpose kernel in order to not spend cycles on things you won't ever need)

floren2• 7 years ago

What technique are you using to digitize these books? I'd be interested in digitizing a few books I have.

ChuckMcM5• 7 years ago

I have a Fujitsu Scansnap 1500 and a heavy duty paper guillotine (basically a very sharp, very tall blade, kind of like this one on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/HFS-Heavy-Guillotine-Paper-Cutter/dp/...). The ScanSnap came with a license to Abbyy's OCR software (which is good for words but it makes for interesting jumbles when you have tables and of course no math recognition). And the Foxit PDF editor version.

Since most of the text books I've scanned are hard covers I cut off the covers, scan those on flatbed scanner, then disassemble the binding to remove the pages. Cut off the margins to get to something closer to 8.5" wide (more modern text books have been "experimenting" with page sizes).

Disassembly takes about 20 minutes, scanning takes another, 10 minutes depending on how many sets I need to scan (the paper feeder for the ScanSnap is nominally 75 pages, but if it gets overloaded can misfeed). Occasionally I'll get a misfeed (two pages feed at the same time) and I generally clean the paper handling belts every 10 or 15 books because they get accumulation that make them less effective at gripping the paper.

leemailll• 7 years ago

I miss it and I also miss a real encyclopedia collection. They both offer a thing Wikipedia always lacks: consistency, in writing style, in topic depth, in error rate. I still remember the weekend in 90s when I had a copy of Encarta and threw the whole weekend to click through topics after topics, and amazed at things it offered. It’s so much fun.

com2kid2• 7 years ago

Encyclopedia's are interesting.

They had to pick and choose what to go into depth on, but when they wanted to go into depth, they would hire the best writers in the field to explain everything really well. Issac Asimov penned more than one encyclopedia article, as did other science fiction authors.

I honestly learned most of my fundamental science knowledge from old 1950s and 1960s science fact books. Asimov in particular has multiple books that explain science really well, down to the level of nuclear fusion and fission, biochemistry, and a lot of other subjects, and I had a few other books in the same vein that were all really old, and really good.

I remember one book that was biographies of famous scientists, it went into depth about Marie Curry and her contributions to science. Reading that ~age 10 certainly impacted my views on gender equality and helped me believe that potential is not limited by gender.

Wikipedia, for all the great things about it, won't really do that. There isn't a Wikipedia page I can point literally anyone[2] at and say "read this and you'll understand the fundamentals of radiation and atomic physics".

I am sure such resources are out there on the web, but the odds of stumbling upon those resources at random is less than the odds of coming across a good science book at random in a thrift store.

That said there are some awesome YT science channels who have worked to fill this gap in quite well, but video sources are different than written sources, with each having their strength. (I read that short 10 or so page biography of Marie Curry probably a half dozen times, not going to do that with a YT video!)

[2] Where anyone is defined as "age 10 and up, with no mathematical background, who wants to be entertained while they read."

tlb• 7 years ago

I think if you start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation you'll find everything you need. It's not all in a single linear article, but that's mostly a strength of the Wikipedia style.

ryacko2• 7 years ago

Have you looked at Citizendium? It is the closest thing there is to a community curated encyclopedia.

Namrog84• 7 years ago

in error rate

I dont have source at moment. But I remember reading a few years ago that wikipedia had fewer errors than most all encyclopedias on average.

There is definitely something to be said about consistency and clustering but on average I believe wikipedia is still the best in fewest errors.

pishpash• 7 years ago

I think it's not error rate, but signal-to-noise ratio. Wikipedia has a lot of noise and is suitable for a critical reader. Old encyclopedias has less quantity but better quality. The whole situation mirrors the old curated internet vs. the new. We still haven't found a situation that is better in every respect between these two extremes.

OrgNet• 7 years ago

Looks like the latest Encarta is from 2009 ... I wonder if they would consider releasing their copyrights to the public

abhinavsharma• 7 years ago

The period of time before the infiniteness of the internet but after CD-ROMs could pack lots of information was fascinating to grow up in. You had lots of curiosity but still limited access to information so you deeply explored stuff.

Add to that, something like Encarta was curated by opinionated editors (whether or not you agree with them is different from the fact that the nature of content is different when it isn't trying to find consensus amongst absolutely everyone) and did not survive based on advertising as most internet content does today.

That set of factors made for a very different world of reading than today.

karthikb• 7 years ago

You had lots of curiosity but still limited access to information so you deeply explored stuff.

I was about to write this myself. Wikipedia has so much information that it’s easy to surf page to page, link out, etc, and end up having skimmed 50 articles and still not understand the thing you came to look at.

cortesoft• 7 years ago

This makes me think about when I used to go to the MacWorld convention in San Francisco as a kid in the early 90's. My mom would take me out of school every year to go (just for the expo hall, we didn't have enough money to actually go to the conference).

I was just overwhelmed by all the different software on offer, and would load up my bag with free samples and spec sheets for software I had no legitimate need for as a 10 year old, but I ate it all up. I would ride the BART home after, just pouring over my loot and being so excited to try the demos at home.

I went a few times after the internet took off, and it just wasn't the same. Who needs demos from an expo hall, when you can just download everything? There was nothing new to see at the hall, everything could be seen from your home just by visiting a url.

I love the world with the internet, but there certainly has been something lost.

lttlrck• 7 years ago

Same for me with magazines. I’d read them cover to cover, even Computer Shopper which was mostly ads! It gave great breadth of knowledge and it was genuinely interesting because they had to be informative. I devoured them all. I miss that.

mntmoss• 7 years ago

This feeling has swept over me, too. We didn't fully realize it at the time, but it was the twilight of our culture being transmitted through "big", tangible products with a distinct publishing apparatus like those demo CDs, VHS tapes, books, newspapers, TV programs etc. Everything went online and became both more available and harder to appreciate - although the old stuff has never gone away entirely, it's just waiting for us to look up from the screen now and then.

aisengard• 7 years ago

Many an evening was spent with clicking on Mindmaze

martin-adams• 7 years ago

I was lucky to have Encarta at home when in school. I remember one kid complaining that I did well in a homework assignment because I had Encarta and the science teacher simply said he can't stop someone from using it to learn.

It's nice that knowledge has become widely accessible with the Internet. The hard part I find now is knowing how to learn with so much access to information.

cptskippy• 7 years ago

I remember in the late 80s and early 90s during the summers when it was too hot to be outside, we'd sit in the den watching PBS with a World Book Encyclopedia tome in our lap just flipping through the pages.

rchaud• 7 years ago

I had Encarta '97 as an 11yo, purchased at a Malaysian street vendor market for probably all of 3 bucks. It felt incredible to have that much knowledge available for almost no money. And it wasn't just boring text like the paper versions, there were videos too!

There was point in time where that truly felt like the future. Considering that we're now in the age of autoplaying, monetized "content" video nearly everywhere you go, it was nice to have only "primary source" video, aka stuff like the moon landing, or the MLK speech, instead of some nobody warbling on about its importance while splicing in stills of said video because they don't want to be in violation of the copyright.

The concept of finite, structured and bounded content is also extremely powerful in this era of overwhelming data, much of which rehashed and warmed over by various publications not to mention utterly infested with ads.

The concept of spending hours down a Wikipedia rabbit hole is not new, and it's one of the reasons I donate annually. But it first started with Encarta, and it's offline-only format has grown to be only more valuable as time goes on.

agumonkey2• 7 years ago

Encarta 97 is the first Microsoft product I ever bought. But I hassled my father to pay for the whole 99$.

aksss2• 7 years ago

Pretty sure the hours-long rabbit hole thing didn’t start with Encarta :D But you still would have been considered a geek of the highest order doing it with Encarta. Wiki first popularized the experience.

isostatic• 7 years ago

The deepest rabbit hole I tend to find is tvtropes.

Start at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHol... and before I know it time has gone.

sanbor• 7 years ago

Pretty much same experience but in Argentina. I got Encarta 97 or 98 for 5 pesos, 5 dollars at that time, when I was 11 years old. Later I read about a Visual Basic course in a newspaper so I figured out that the way to build software was using this Visual Basic software. So I went to the same place where I bought Encarta and got Visual Basic 5, which was my first programming language.

kragen21• 7 years ago

I'm guessing you were only able to access Encarta because copyright enforcement wasn't strong here in Argentina? (Or was US$5 the Microsoft official price?) What do you think about my comment on Kiwix and Wikipedia at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101?

therein2• 7 years ago

I've had a similar Encarta experience as you and the GP.

Even the VB5 bit is identical. Bought a 2-3$ Encarta copy from a random guy in a random store selling pirated CDs. I remember the guy sitting in his small shop, downloading stuff over Torrent and burning them to CDs. He had a machine with the most CD-writers I had ever seen in my life.

I loved flying over terrains in Encarta's terrain explorer (or whatever it was called, I didn't really understand English back then, perhaps even learned it through Visual Studio and Encarta). Whenever I was bored and kids do get bored often, I would get on Encarta, especially since Wikipedia wasn't a thing back then.

chicagofan98• 7 years ago

What I remember most about Encarta is how impossible the "Mind Maze" game was as a kid

kfrzcode• 7 years ago

Oh man, many many many hours

dTal• 7 years ago

Oh god I can still hear the music

theandrewbailey• 7 years ago

If there was something like Mind Maze today, I might check it out.

shortformblog4• 7 years ago

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity elements of Encarta make it something that you kind of wish had a more direct role in the modern day.

I wrote about this topic a few years ago (https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to speak up (I added some of his comments to the piece). There was a lot of back-room wheeling and dealing around digital encyclopedias during that era, much of it centered around Encarta—Microsoft acquired a lot of publishers during that period and it effectively disrupted most of the rest out of existence.

But even considering that, Encarta was special. I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story.

It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate.

nickthegreek• 7 years ago

I remember getting Encarta 95 back when it first came out (I was 14 at the time) and the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information and got me that much more invested in learning technology.

Literally a week after getting Encarta a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house and I showed him why I did not need his books. You could see the look of terror in his eyes.

bredren• 7 years ago

I saw the Hindenburg disaster video on Encarta, which was an intro to how articles and media could be put together. It amazed me at the time.

jbob2000• 7 years ago

With a little bit of investment, the Civilization game series could be leveraged to replace that feeling you got from Encarta.

dawnerd• 7 years ago

I actually just found an encarta 95 disk in a spindle of other random disks I had. Good memories from it.

echelon• 7 years ago

a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house

That's an alien relic of an anecdote as there ever was.

The world has profoundly changed in the last twenty five years. Cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing has almost completely rewired society and changed business, jobs, dating, friendship, travel.

I really wonder what the next big changes will be. Cheap satellites in orbit and dramatically reduced LEO costs? Better battery tech? Advances in materials science? Human cloning and genetic modification? What modern trappings of the present time will feel used and dated in twenty years?

pkaye2• 7 years ago

My parents got us a full blown Encyclopedia Britannica book set in the 80s. Probably cost $1000 which was difficult by how much they made. But they paid it down monthly. I used to have loads of fun thumbing through those books. There were a few index books where you looked up a topic and it would refer you to a page in one of the other books. Closest thing to the internet back then.

markus_zhang• 7 years ago

Yeah it is THE software for multi-media showcase. Back in 90s I had a copy of shareware/demo version and it already blowed my mind off. The whole collection was like a dozen CD I think? I never got the chance to see it though. Nowadays we still don't have something that match up the experience.

goatinaboat• 7 years ago

the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information

Same experience here. It was like having the computer from the Starship Enterprise but it was right here and now and I got to use it. It’s been a long time since I felt that sense of wonder from anything in computing.

helloguillecl• 7 years ago

Do you happen to remember this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A

jacobolus• 7 years ago

My grandparents got a Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia one volume at a time from a supermarket marketing thing in the 1950s.

Amusingly, many of the articles in Encarta were copied verbatim from there.

JimOk5• 7 years ago

A long time encyclopedia editor (who worked at Britannica, World Book, and Encarta) told me that door to door encyclopedia sales were dying well before Encarta. Due to the rise in two income couples, which radically narrowed the time window when you could get anyone to give you time at the door...

ksec• 7 years ago

I see it as a Free Vs Paid Model, Wiki is Free, and it is good enough for most use cases. Encarta had a lot of licensing, and I doubt any of that will ever be free, but the quality of those articles inside Encarta or Britannica in many ways are still way ahead of Wiki.

ticmasta2• 7 years ago

I think it goes even beyond paid vs free; the wiki model of knowledgeable, caring volunteers doing all this work for free seemed pretty crazy to all but a very few. Curated collections like Encarta and encyclopedias also tended to have very cursory entries for all but the broadest and market-focused topics. IMO a biased article is better than no information at all. In the very least it gives us a starting point for discovery, discussion and improvement. Most of what we today take for granted started with a pretty one-sided viewpoint that gained attention and inclusiveness.

B1FF_PSUVM• 7 years ago

Way back when, I yielded to temptation, as comrade Oscar advised, and at a fair bought a sealed Britannica CD-ROM box.

It came with a parallel port dongle -not mentioned in the box copy- to ensure that the precious was not shared.

It did not work right, and I was cured of buying that stuff.

duxup2• 7 years ago

It's funny to think of it but CD-ROMs ... really were where all the multimedia was.

Outside professionals, not many people stored videos or audio on their PC in the early day, so all the multimedia type stuff, and to some extent including video games ... was all centered around the CD-ROM.

I used to gobble up all the super cheap "multimedia collection" type disks available at the time.

To some extent what made computers the multimedia place to be was the good old CD-ROM, well before the internet took it over.

cr0sh4• 7 years ago

There were earlier systems in the 1980s that combined PCs (or equivalent machines) with Pioneer LaserDisc systems (which could be controlled via a serial port) - a somewhat well known one was the BBC Domesday Project:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

An early glimpse of the future, somewhat.

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

We have an old encyclopedia set - not Britannica though, from the 1910s or 1920s. I think it was my grandfather's originally, bought for father and uncles. Perhaps the generation earlier.

Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. On medicine, zoology and other sciences, it's occasionally surprising how we used to think. I'd periodically pick it up and read a few entries at random, and often disappear down a rabbit hole. At some point it stopped being obsolete and pointless to become fascinating history.

That's one thing Encarta could have been had it continued - a valuable snapshot of how thought and knowledge evolved. Always updated Wikipedia can and will never be that as sadly you can't snapshot a given date, and digging through edit histories is horribly unfriendly. We may have lost something there.

martin_a• 7 years ago

Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out.

Same for me. My grandfather was a teacher and I saved quite a few of the old school/teaching books after he died.

Did you know that the Empire State Building is the highest building on earth?

Well, it was, when these books were printed. :-)

tzs• 7 years ago

I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story.

It was a killer app for CD-ROM, but for the title of the killer app I'd say DeLorme's "Street Atlas USA" had at least an equal claim.

cr0sh4• 7 years ago

I would almost say the -the- killer app for CD-ROM was Myst. I know I bought my second PC in 1994 (an Acer 486 DX2-50 with Vesa Local Bus graphics and a CD-ROM drive) just so I could play it (my previous machines as an adult were both Amigas).

You may be wondering why I say "second PC" - well, just before graduating high school my parents bought me a laptop, a Tandy 1100HD - which was technically my first PC. Later, after I had left home on my own, I bought an Amiga 2000, then an Amiga 1200, before getting the 486.

tripzilch3• 7 years ago

... not quite equal, Encarta was useful in more places than just the US.

m1sta_• 7 years ago

Is Encarta open source? Microsoft might be open to allowing it to be integrated into Wikipedia.

davidgerard• 7 years ago

It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate.

We actually asked them about this, IIRC - it turns out a lot of that stuff was licensed from third parties, and they weren't free to release it under a free content license, and didn't have the resources to sort out what was what.

shortformblog4• 7 years ago

That’s very unfortunate, but I’m glad to hear Wikipedia was actually thinking in this general direction.

scarface744• 7 years ago

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out.

Encarta lasted from 1991-2009.

The iPod was introduced in 2001, saw sells start to fall off a cliff around 2009 and were all discontinued in 2017 - except for the iPod in name only iPod Touch. No one would say that the iPod was a failure. Encarta helped start the multimedia PC boom that helped make home computers more ubiquitous just like the iPod was Apple’s introduction to a wider audience.

Retric2• 7 years ago

Calling the iPad touch an iPad in name only is disingenuous. It’s 1/2 the price of the original and has more space etc. As to falling off a cliff, they sold significantly more iPods in 09, 10, and 11 than 06. They even sold more than 3x as many iPods in 2014 than 2004.

Apples watch is still a watch even if it does a lot of other things. Microsoft never ported Encarta functionality to anything after 09, it just died.

anthony_doan• 7 years ago

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out.

Felt the same way with IE until Mozilla came along after Netscape died.

joblessjunkie5• 7 years ago

I appreciated this article. I agree that "Microsoft was never in it for the history."

Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives.

The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks.

CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail.

It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....

hugh4life• 7 years ago

Wikipedia could do a better job integrating media.

I remember Encarta being pretty good about having video files showing the outlines of wars and battles... at least for the Vietnam War which is what I remember most. I prefer watching a video outline of wars and battles on youtube rather than dig right into a wall of text on wikipedia.

situational872• 7 years ago

I still remember using one of the earliest Encarta versions and seeing a tiny postage stamp sized video animate and play some half broken wav file for the first time. I remember it hitting me like a baseball bat: we can do VIDEOS on computers now! This will change everything! TV is going to die because there are no ads on computers!

disgruntledphd2• 7 years ago

Those were more innocent times, to be fair.

smacktoward5• 7 years ago

Look on the bright side, you got two out of three right :D

rtkwe2• 7 years ago

Also things like the globe or the timeline mentioned in the article would be great to add to wikipedia. Being able to quickly pull up a timeline of battles mentioned on wikipedia that took place or involved a certain country could be neat. Similar things on the globe could illustrate a lot of things.

WorldMaker3• 7 years ago

Yes. Part of the problem is the CC license restriction of Wikipedia/Wikimedia. A lot of primary sources such as the ones Encarta included were often proprietary licensed and copyrighted products. According to Wikipedia's annual donation bars they (supposedly) spend enough on hosting costs every year that spending money on licensing media content is (probably) out of the question for them.

I almost wish for a sort of intellectual property "eminent domain" promoting more things like famous news footage into the public domain where they fit an "almanac" need. Though I admit creating any sort of such program would be really hard to do, as the boundaries would be murky and it potentially would impact the revenue of companies and groups that generally need such revenue to survive (PBS, for example).

nocturnial• 7 years ago

I know it's just a typo in the article but I really love the phrase "malware invested version"

In a way, this phrasing also works.

galonk• 7 years ago

It's not reflected in OP's screenshot, but there was a period where Encarta (and a companion product called Microsoft Bookshelf) used a very flat, Swiss-design aesthetic that was catnip to graphic-designer-wanna-be kid me. You can draw a direct line from that era through Microsoft's Neptune UI experiments down to the Metro design language.

contextfree• 7 years ago

Here's a talk by Bill Flora who was a lead designer for many of the products along that line, from Encarta through to Windows Phone: https://vimeo.com/56764845

chc4• 7 years ago

Odd anecdote, but my middle school had Encarta 2009 on all the computers and I spent a lot of time going through the historical location free roams finding bad geometry to glitch through walls.

I found out-of-bound clips in like 4 of them, and thought it was all very cool seeing all the level geometry and non-clearing graphics smearing across the screen. Probably contributed to my interest in computers and cybersecurity, ironically, no matter how much my teachers said it was a waste of time...

agumonkey2• 7 years ago

Earliest mention and use of Macromedia Flash in my case.

sureste• 7 years ago

The thing about Encarta to me is that it felt so much more interactive than what we have today.

Nowadays we read a Wikipedia article or watch a Youtube video on a topic but never interact with the content. It's all very passive. I was a child during the heyday of Encarta and I remember I had it and a few other specialized encyclopedias (one about animals, one about sea life, one about dinosaurs!!) and they were all interactive. I miss this about computers. Not all things have to be a game or passive which is what I see nowadays when a child has a screen in front of their face.

cpach• 7 years ago

I never mess interactivity when browsing Wikipedia. I love that WP is text-based, so that I can read it in my own preferred tempo. I rarely watch videos since to me they always feel too slow compared to reading text. I understand on an intellectual level that Youtube is a great platform that provide lots of value and entertainment to lots of people, but I never feel that greatness since it’s not something that I personally appreciate. Oh well, to each their own :)

johannes12343212• 7 years ago

There is value in "all" information being text. However there's also value in having interactive elements. From the contextual fitting video to i.e. an embedded star map: Imagine reading the article about a solar eclipse and being able to navigate a 3D model of the stars. Imagine reading an article about the human body and having a 3D model right next to it: If you click on "heart" in the text it's being highlighted in the model.

Of course Encarta wasn't there, but we have 20 years of technological advance. But for hobbyist Wikipedia authors that's too much work and for a commercial Encarta Wikipedia is too strong.

aksss2• 7 years ago

I’m the same way. Video is such a slow mechanism for consuming information, so unless it’s primary material to bear witness to something, it’s usually just a lot of overhead - slow talking intros, context setting, bias, association, etc.

My memories with Encarta aren’t that special - the searching was cool but I think I was jaded to the cdrom video thing already, wishing it could be better technically. Definitely gave you a sense of what could be possible with an endless source of material, irrespective of copyright.

chrisco2555• 7 years ago

I was randomly looking up prehistoric musical instruments the other day and I couldn't help but want to see the instruments and watch a video of them being played. It was not available on Wikipedia.

baroffoos• 7 years ago

The one place where I found videos were hugely better was blender tutorial videos. The program has countless features and shortcuts and is hugely visual. The video just helps you capture as much of that information as possible as well as showing you the typical workflow of a pro.

kragen21• 7 years ago

What kinds of interactivity are you referring to? I didn't have Encarta. My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 is largely about how interactivity is missing from Wikipedia articles and Kiwix.

ryanmercer• 7 years ago

"Alan, friend of Archer, defender of all Gorgonites, Keeper of Encarta..."

I remember when I first popped an Encarta 1995 CD into a computer and watched an incredibly terrible clip of something (I believe it was the Hindenburg blowing up). My mind was blown.

bluedino• 7 years ago

When I was a kid, my grandmother brought home a cardboard box with a 4-5 mis-matched volumes of encyclopedias in it. Always a bookworm, I could read an article about any subject in them and be content for hours.

You can imagine my joy when, omewhere around 1991 or 1992, we got a new computer in the library at school. It was a dedicated station for the encyclopedia, and it was even set up in the same location as the printed ones were.

My faded memory recalls it being Compton's Encyclopedia. It ran on an 286 IBM PS/2 (the all-in-one unit), and it had a mouse, external CD-ROM, and a laser printer. The rumor was that it cost $10,000. It wasn't fast, it probably took closed to a minute to search for, and then retrieve an article.

TransAMrit• 7 years ago

You're close! It was Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, which I started with as well. When I later saw Encarta, I thought Compton's was a superior product.

smacktoward5• 7 years ago

I would also add that I miss Microsoft Cinemania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cinemania), which was to IMDB what Encarta was to Wikipedia.

The sad bit is that in some ways Cinemania in 1997 was superior to IMDB as it is today. IMDB is more comprehensive, but Cinemania was better designed and more fun to just browse through.

WorldMaker3• 7 years ago

Yeah, I remember some of the historic reviews from Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert in it being incredibly informative. Particularly where they had good video excerpts of the reviews from their respective syndicated television review segments. (Remember when TV News used to have regular movie reviews? It's almost strange how in the 24/7 news channel era we've lost more types of segments than we've gained.)

smacktoward5• 7 years ago

That was definitely a strong point of Cinemania -- it integrated a bunch of different types of information about a movie (plot description, cast list, video and still images, reviews of it by respected critics, etc.) into a cohesive, unified interface.

Contrast this to IMDB, which has some but not all of that information (no reviews, for instance), and what it does have is presented in a clunky, siloed fashion. It works, but it's not something that's absorbing to just browse through the way Cinemania was.

tasogare2• 7 years ago

I have the one on musical instruments: https://archive.org/details/microsoft-musical-instruments. Spend hours in it even if I wasn't that interested by music.

smacktoward5• 7 years ago

I didn't even know that had existed! MS really did have a fascinating CD-ROM portfolio back in the day.

mikepurvis• 7 years ago

I came here looking for someone to have mentioned Cinemania— it's crazy to me that Cinemania '97 is now 22 years old. Even a classic like The Matrix is too new to have been part of it.

But yeah, it was a terrific resource; if nothing else it solidified Roger Ebert for young me as a source of truth on movies. :)

turc1656• 7 years ago

I thought I was going to be the first to mention Cinemania but it seems you beat me to it! It was a major influence on how I found great/classic movies to watch. It was really informative and just overall a pretty great piece of software for the time. I distinctly remember discovering Silence of the Lambs on Cinemania and they had a clip of the famous "...ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti" scene and one or two other clips from that film and I knew I had to watch the movie. Really interesting product, for sure.

ergothus• 7 years ago

I'm either old enough or out-of-touch enough that I never used Encarta. Reading the comments here, I see a lot of mention of the interactive elements and video.

I generally prefer text - it's easier to search, and faster to consume. But I don't assume that my preferences are always best, so...

Why was Encarta so good? Why is it good enough that we should wish we had it today? Is there some analog today that could let me "get it"? Because currently I live in a world where more and more info is moving to podcasts and videos and I hate it. Clearly I'm missing something, so help me out?

ses1984• 7 years ago

It also had a bunch of text that was easy to search. Imagine replacing a shelf full of encyclopedias (that cost a lot) with a single cd, AND it had some videos.

shortformblog4• 7 years ago

You have to remember that this was during an era when the internet was not as common, so this was competing with physical books, not digital media. And the result was much more immersive than reading a book, and the internet was not yet mature enough to be an effective format for reading hypertext.

Additionally, consider that much the audience for it was people in grade school. If you were in the seventh grade in 1995, you were the perfect age to really engage with that kind of approach—which seemed awesome compared to a boring textbook.

I think in many ways, our information consumption has gotten much more dense over time. But in 1995, people would approach this like they would a nice, long magazine article. Efficiency was not the goal: It was something that hit all the senses.

bonestamp2• 7 years ago

I generally prefer text

Encarta had text. It was mostly text. But sometimes text isn't the best medium for conveying some information. For example, maybe there's an article about lizards. You can describe the way a lizard moves, but it makes much more sense to have a video embedded that can show you what that movement looks like with all of its nuances that would be difficult to describe and understand in text.

So, think of wikipedia, but curated by professional library scientists and verified subject matter experts with first source video and audio clips (and photos) embedded where helpful.

ahje• 7 years ago

Why was Encarta so good?

Simply put: It was accessible, interactive and enabled users to find information at a pace that wasn't really achievable through other means.

I first used Encarta when I was in the 6th grade, in order to find information for an essay I was writing. The local library had just gotten a new PC with a CD-ROM drive, and the librarian suggested I use Encarta as it was brand new, while any books they had on the subject would be rather old and outdated.

I got down behind the PC, launched Encarta and I was simply blown away. This was my first real multi-media experience and while computers were becoming mainstream in the early 90's, I simply hadn't seen anything like it before. Sure, an Amiga could play music and simple videos, and a fast 486 could decode MPEG video, but hard drives back then were typically less than 100 MB and the amount of storage allowed by CD-ROM's allowed Encarta to be an (until then) unparalleled experience.

Remember, until then, you'd have to use card indexes in order to find the right book about the subject, then look for the book and hope nobody else had borrowed it. With Encarta, it was as simple as typing in a search term and finding the results. Instantly. Internet wasn't really a thing back then - I'd heard about it, it existed, but it didn't reach the general populace until around '94-'95, and there simply wasn't anything comparable until Wikipedia came along.

deckarep• 7 years ago

I was just telling me wife a few weeks back about Microsoft Encarta. Turns out she had a copy too back in the day.

My best memory is getting a copy shortly after CD-ROM drives were still new territory. I loaded the disc and the first thing I searched for was either rap or hip/hop. To my delight an audio clip played of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message...keep in mind this was at a time when Multimedia was new and the idea that CD-ROMs could hold enough data to make a richer experience was ground-breaking!

Causality12• 7 years ago

There was a certain method of presenting information that just doesn't seem to exist anymore in the modern world. The by-design weaving together of text, images, video, and audio when giving information about a certain topic. Sure, wikipedia articles have one or two images, maybe an audio clip, and plenty of links to other text articles, but nothing like an encyclopedia or other informational software of the 90s. You'd have software about, say, dinosaurs, and there'd be big diagrams where every word was a link to a descriptive media. It feels like we've shrunk. You can watch a Youtube video but it's just a video; you can't pause it on a picture of a T-Rex and click on its mouth to learn about T-Rex teeth. The modern web forever has you finding any piece of information you need starting from zero, and most of the time you can't summon the energy to do that for everything you might find interesting.

Interactive multimedia is dead and I think today's children are worse off for it.

mopsi2• 7 years ago

Video of the dino browsing experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgOZUPUGuwY

Causality12• 7 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking of, thank you.

jdsnape• 7 years ago

In the UK (at least) we had a similar CD encyclopaedia from Dorling Kindersley which I used to use at the local Library before we had a computer. I particularly remember the Space and the Universe one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxEREP6LSLw) which I found totally amazing as a kid. You moved around different rooms, and there were videos and the best mood music!

chrstphrhrt• 7 years ago

"Where do YOU want to go today?"

Will never forget the awesome splash screen with various historic photos and the video clip with clouds(?), while/after it loaded content from the CD-ROM.

Edit: found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTOAHlGaDoo

Edit 2: Okay the above was generic but I remember similar bits of it used for Encarta.

Tokkemon• 7 years ago

One of my favorite CD-ROMs from my childhood was an Encarta offshoot called Microsoft Exploropedia, World of Nature. Basically Encarta for natural sciences but tailored for kids. That game was the bomb.

pmyteh2• 7 years ago

There is an entire book on the creation of Explorapedia, I sing the body electronic: A year with Microsoft on the multimedia frontier by Fred Moody (my copy is ISBN 0-340-64927-5). It's fascinating for its insights not only on the messiness of the design process, but also the process and deadline constraints that the team were working under (which feel like a general rather than a specific set of lessons).

ravenpi• 7 years ago

While I have heard good things about the book itself, it is tainted by the fact that Moody was its author. The man literally and viscerally hated Linux, and went to great lengths to paint it in as poor a light as he could -- and then seemed surprised when people took issue with that. [Note that I neither condone not participate in flaming, but the man's tone really necessitated entire asbestos wardrobes.] I was neither surprised nor saddened when he and his column parted ways.

withinrafael• 7 years ago

It was also bundled with the Microsoft EasyBall, the giant mouse with a yellow ball [1].

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=22...

sawthinkar• 7 years ago

Oh man, I still remember, my dad first showed me Encarta and he was quite impressed with how it can still be used offline. One of the best moments I had with my dad :')

jancsika• 7 years ago

In a world of 4k streaming video, global wireless, and high-speed everything, there's really no analog to the feeling we got watching the Moon Landing as a video in Encarta - short of watching it live on TV in the 1969! For most of us, this was the first time we'd ever seen full-motion video on-demand on a computer in any sort of fidelity - and these are mostly 320x240 or smaller videos!

I remember watching that video. I was dazzled by the novelty of it and immediately tried searching for all videos and playing all I could find on the CD-ROM.

Just to compare I perused the Wikipedia "moon landing" page to compare. At first I was surprised that I couldn't find this video. Then I realized there's a separate entry specifically for the Apollo 11 mission. It links to the following page:

https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

... which as a whole HTML5 interface to go back and experience the launch in realtime.

I'm going to watch it later, but I'll ask ahead of time-- is the author really stating that the feeling of watching that single video on Encarta was more enthralling than what I'll experience with that HTML5 interface?

Edit: wording

ryacko2• 7 years ago

It is a combination of novelty and uniqueness.

Novel because it was the first time the author saw the moon landing.

Unique because we are bombarded with videos all the time.

mopsi2• 7 years ago

I'm going to watch it later, but I'll ask ahead of time-- is the author really stating that the feeling of watching that single video on Encarta was more enthralling than what I'll experience with that HTML5 interface?

Encarta and Apollo in Real Time are not opposites, but the same: interactive experiences.

In contrast, Wikipedia is very static. I don't recall ever seeing an interactive visualization on Wikipedia like this animated and highlighted/annotated jet engine: https://s2.smu.edu/propulsion/Pages/variations.htm It's much better at getting information across than text or static images, but harder to put together in standardized text editors/languages like markup, so somewhere along the way we lost the colorful interactive animations that Encarta was known for.

jackvalentine• 7 years ago

Those jet animations are really good.

I've found some math animations on wikipedia, some of which are good and some of which are totally pointless:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mathematical_ani...

Certainly I'd love to see the wikimedia foundation fund animators to produce explanatory diagrams and animations for more things!

Crinus2• 7 years ago

I'm going to watch it later, but I'll ask ahead of time-- is the author really stating that the feeling of watching that single video on Encarta was more enthralling than what I'll experience with that HTML5 interface?

It is also very possible that the author didn't knew about the page you linked, which is another "issue" with Internet vs Encarta: you can find way more information on the Internet at way more depth, but... you need to find it first. Encarta was comparatively very little information and depth but everything it has is by design easily discoverable.

mrev19• 7 years ago

This is a really good book which documents the development process of Encarta. Its a fantastic story. I found it so engrossing it inspired me to become a developer. Its also a fascinating snapshot of a very interesting time in Seattle's history, at the intersection of grunge and the nascent tech boom.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0788157930/ref=dbs_a_def_r...

dmix• 7 years ago

I was always curious whether or not these other encyclopedias could function as good sources for Wikipedia articles?

Personally I believe more universities should be publishing websites/wikis ala Encyclopedias like this [1] that provide good foundation sourcing for their particular fields of work and original content like video, graphics, and photos (ideally creative commons, especially the ones with public funding).

1. https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/cephalopods

yowlingcat• 7 years ago

Although Wikipedia is without a doubt extremely impressive, I definitely do have a very soft spot in my heart for Encarta. Much of it is nostalgic, but the immediacy, content consistency and ability to use as an interactive offline experience was fantastic. What a time capsule it is.

whereistimbo2• 7 years ago

I'm still not able to heard the full version of Sicuriada as played in Encarta, the full version is only available in cassette version of Music of the Andes and Argentina and can only be borrowed on library far away from me :(.

oneplane• 7 years ago

We never really used Encarta, and I don't really know anyone who ever did. Right in the middle of the CD-ROMs are big and DSL just starting to become available period we got a few educational CDs that did more specialised things like only the history and current state of geographical information, or just mathematics, or just historical events of one country. No full encyclopedia was really digitally popular as the schools and libraries all had plenty of physical copies and people around to help use/find them.

It probably didn't help that it was a Microsoft-only deal as most of the stuff was an odd mix Netware-driven PC's without Optical drives (we had ZIP!) or library computers that were locked in a box so you couldn't really put a CD in them. And everything else was an Apple Mac, so you could put the CD in but you got nothing out of it.

We did have something else, I don't remember the name of it, but it was like a network-CD-drive-server device that worked on Windows 95, 98 and 2000, as well as Macs, and we had a cross-platform (flash/shockwave based AFAIK) viewer thing that was probably an encyclopaedia but it was never named or marketed as such. It didn't have videos but it did have the same information as the paper versions.

Most people who did end up owning (some version of) Encarta got a demo or companion version with some other product, much like the Microsoft Works package you sometimes got with systems, but right around that time Wikipedia was already gaining popularity.

paulddraper• 7 years ago

I used Encarta heavily in 6-8th grades.

Internet searches were of dubious quality, and libraries were inconvenient.

Encarta was the first stop for looking something up.

HeavenBanned• 7 years ago

Anyone remember MindMaze? ...was amazing.

kalleboo2• 7 years ago

I never used Encarta - in my world it was all Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia

RandomTisk• 7 years ago

Encarta still has the best video/animation on Quantum physics I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnhqqISBSA

athrun• 7 years ago

Thank you for sharing this video! It certainly clicked for me.

Wowfunhappy• 7 years ago

Does anyone know how easy it is to extract just the text / html out of an Encarta CD/DVD? If it's easy, I'll go out and buy one right now.

For no particularly good reason, I have this urge to create a local txt or basic html version of one of the major encyclopedias (something a bit more concise than the full Wikipedia). I love the idea that I could keep a summary of most human knowledge in a 400mb plain text file on my hard drive.

mongol• 7 years ago

I bet it is an Access database inside. But probably some copy protection too

kragen21• 7 years ago

You should check out my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 for a summary of the current state of some of the existing projects that do some of this, but also check out the Wikipedia Vital Articles lists. Typical "vital" articles are large, about 100K, so in 400MB you could manage about 4000 articles, which is most of the ones in the fourth-level Vital Articles list.

HNcantBtrustd• 7 years ago

Encarta confused me as a young kid. It wasn't a video game, but I played it like a video game.

I didn't understand what an encyclopedia was.

6thaccount2• 7 years ago

Encarta was awesome as a kid. I never knew it was Microsoft that made it. The trivia game was creepy and fun.

blueboo2• 7 years ago

People fondly remember using Encarta as children. It was a child's encyclopedia for children.

In a world of 4k streaming video, global wireless, and high-speed everything, there's really no analog to the feeling we got watching the Moon Landing as a video in Encarta - short of watching it live on TV in the 1969!

This is just absurd nostalgia. Even back in the author's good old days, kids also watched this stuff on VHS and LaserDisc. These days, kids watch SpaceX landing reusable rockets live on their phones.

What was special was being able to freely browse it. Wikipedia crushes it in every imaginable respect, from being more readable, to having more rich media.

It's fine to cherish your memories of Encarta...but kids have it better now and experience the same things more richly. Sorry, dad!

smacktoward5• 7 years ago

These days, kids watch SpaceX landing reusable rockets live on their phones.

These days kids type "space" into the YouTube app on their phone and end up watching videos telling them that the earth is actually flat.

blueboo2• 7 years ago

Their grandparents might! Kids have already learned how to sift through the dross .. it’s internet survival 101.

meerita2• 7 years ago

The problem with products like Encarta was bias and the speed of updating the mistakes, misinformation, etc. I had Encarta, and Internet wasn't an option back then, I had it in a CD. But today it would be nice to have some product that competes with the vastness of Wikipedia.

jonknee• 7 years ago

It competed against very expensive and bulky sets of books, so the update speed was more than acceptable.

meerita2• 7 years ago

Indeed. It was the best option back then. I've attended a conf. of Jimmy Wales and he mentioned the same problems that enciclopedias had.

JorgeGT• 7 years ago

The Encarta orbits demo was the Kerbal Space Program of my childhood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy9R41Rord0

MarcScott• 7 years ago

I was lucky enough to grow up with a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica in my house, that my Dad purchased in the early eighties. The set was amazing, and an endless help when researching homework.

Then I encountered the BBC's Domesday Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project) and was blown away by the quantity of information that was available on a laser disk in my school library.

Then came Encarta, which similarly impressed, and now Wikipedia.

I can't even contemplate the quantity of information and in what form it will take, when my son reaches my age, but I bet it would blow my contemporary mind.

hk__24• 7 years ago

One thing that commercial encyclopedias like Encarta can have that Wikipedia can’t is non-free content. Say you can buy the rights for 1000s of images from some source; you can use them in your private encyclopedia, but Wikipedia’s medias must be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and for this must be under a CC-like license or in the public domain.

kragen21• 7 years ago

This is indeed an enormous problem, and a very significant reason we need to shorten copyright terms. When copyright terms were retroactively lengthened here in Argentina, we had to delete huge swaths of historical footage and photography from Wikipedia. Into the memory hole!

Wikimedia Commons is more relaxed about licensing than Wikipedia is for text — because most of the images on Wikipedia and allied projects are not and cannot be created specifically for Wikipedia, we have to tolerate a wider spread of licensing terms. However, the images do need to be licensed for use on Wikipedia, which is already a pretty permissive license.

See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 for more social context.

taurath• 7 years ago

I miss Compton 95 - it had PATRICK STEWART as the introduction narrator.

The multimedia was really really well done, and went a lot further than Wikipedia in a lot of articles. Better editorial and emphasis for sure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbP9jiWX08U

cryptoz2• 7 years ago

I miss Encarta, but most of all I miss Mindmaze.

timwaagh2• 7 years ago

Never heard of it. Care to enlighten me?

cryptoz2• 7 years ago

It was a quiz game based on information in the Encarta Encyclopedia. You would uncover areas of a castle or something like that, as you gained knowledge and correctly answered questions.

This looks like a video of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmudzYWY94

whereistimbo2• 7 years ago

I never heard the full version of Sicuriada[0] as played in Encarta. It's not available on digital or even CD[1], it's only available on cassette version, which is not sold anymore and only available in libraries[2] which are far away from me :(

[0] https://youtu.be/deVyPq-AHfc?t=223 [1] https://www.amazon.com/Music-Andes-Argentina-Tahuantinsuyo/d... [2] https://www.worldcat.org/title/music-of-the-andes-and-argent...

nnq• 7 years ago

Just saying... IF a team of experts would put time and effort into curating and editing and adding in useful interactive vizualizations into a subset of Wikipedia I'd care about I'd pay a hefty subscription for it!

Really, Encarta was freakin awesome... now we have a lot more information, but nobody is curating, checking, validating and arranging it in nice and easy to consume ways :(

grawprog• 7 years ago

I used to love encarta. The thing I remember most though were the entries on musical instruments from around the world. I remember being blown away by the different types of instruments and used to spent lots of time just clicking the interactive map and reading about them and listening to the different clips they had. That was where I first learned about and heard the difference between all the different types of bag pipes they have in different countries. Up until then, I only knew about the Scottish ones.

dx7tnt• 7 years ago

Holy moly I'd forgotten about that. Endless hours of clicking in the school library.

chadlavi• 7 years ago

Microsoft Encarta taught me a surprising amount of world history and culture. Would never know what a balalaika is otherwise!

LeoPanthera• 7 years ago

I carry around an offline copy of Wikipedia on my phone using Kiwix, including the pictures! It's amazing how much space it doesn't take up. It's quite useful if you're often in places without cellular coverage.

https://www.kiwix.org/en/

Synaesthesia• 7 years ago

I used Grolier’s and thought it was great.

GSHF2J32nBpb• 7 years ago

Oh! I have very fond memories of Encarta. I basically stopped playing video games because of it.

pbreit• 7 years ago

Is any of the Encarta content available in public domain or other?

V-22• 7 years ago

Here in Poland Encarta is probably best remembered for its ridiculous entry on Poland, depicting it in a rather outdated manner, to put it mildly. It caused quite an uproar back in the day, and went sort of viral.

See http://of19.internetdsl.pl/bzdury/encarta/ (in Polish, but includes the screenshots in English, which are self-explanatory)

asdf21• 7 years ago

Seems about right.

V-22• 7 years ago

Well, is not.

kragen21• 7 years ago

Writing this from an occasionally-connected hand computer in the “developing world”, don't use Encarta. Use Kiwix. I have a 45000-article slice of the English Wikipedia here in 6 GB, with nearly all the pictures, and even animations and some video and audio, such as the radio broadcast of the Hindenburg crash. To give you an idea of its breadth, articles I've consulted recently include "anal sex", "rectum", "convolution", "ferret", "Dorothy Parker", and "principal component analysis". (This probably paints an unjustifiably interesting picture of my hobbies.) The whole English Wikipedia, 4 million articles, is 35 GB without pictures.

(Encarta was 32000 articles and, as pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741028, ridiculously biased on some subjects, in precisely the way that Wikipedia scrupulously avoids.)

The biggest problem I have with Kiwix is that, on Android, its built-in downloader for ZIM files is flaky, and I haven't figured out how to load ZIM files I downloaded in some other way yet, such as on a MicroSD card. The non-Android version works fine with such sideloaded ZIM files. (I also miss the interlanguage links; I have a few languages of Wikipedia on here, and even when I don't it's often useful to find out things like the Guarani word for "ferret". And of course I don't have a local Google Search.)

Kiwix also has ZIM files for things like Wikisource (7.2 GB for English), Project Gutenberg (54GB for English), and Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites. The English Stack Overflow is 134 gigabytes.

As for the globe, a much better option than Encarta is OsmAnd~. My country is under 0.6 GB, including most of the public transit routes, down to the bus-stop level. Bonus: lat/long links in Kiwix open in OsmAnd~. Minus: OsmAnd~ doesn't have any way to load satellite imagery, even the Blue Marble MODIS dataset.

Both Kiwix and OsmAnd~ are available on F-Droid, so you know they're not malware.

But none of this is interactivity. Watch Alan Kay’s talks where he talks about kids building dynamical models in Etoys to understand gravitational acceleration. Much more interesting than the Wikipedia article on convolution by itself: I have IPython, Numpy, and SciPy on my netbook, so I can create signals and kernels, convolve them, and look at the results. I can compare my own implementation of convolution to the library implementation. I can do principal component analysis with the LAPACK functions for it. That's interactivity, and it's a far more powerful learning tool than mere hypertext. And I don't have anything like it for Android. Is there anything?

An interesting thing to note about all of these — Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, IPython, and LAPACK — is that none of them are products of capitalism. They coexist with capitalism, but they are all products of a non-capitalist form of production, sometimes called "commons-based peer production", which evidently outperforms capitalist production in certain areas just as capitalist production outperformed feudal agriculture. The crucial question for the future of humanity, I think, is how we can extend commons-based peer production to new spheres, and the biggest obstacle seems to be artificial scarcity produced by government-granted monopolies — patent, copyright, and so on.

lstamour3• 7 years ago

While I appreciate the recommendations, the language/tone is a bit over the top. Nobody’s seriously suggesting you should dump offline slices of Google Maps, or Open Street Map (OsmAnd) in order to use an outdated virtual atlas. It’s more like we’re reminiscing on how National Geographic (and others) used to actually publish these very large world atlases, and how for it’s time, CD-ROM-delivered encyclopedias for the world’s primary platform of the day (Windows) were revolutionary.

kragen21• 7 years ago

Thank you! Censored.

The original article does indeed suggest that people like me are using Encarta today rather than the things I suggested. I assume Scott is correct about that, and I wanted to offer them some better alternatives than the profoundly shitty proprietary experience offered by Encarta. I mean, what does Encarta have to say about principal component analysis or anal sex?

chrisco2555• 7 years ago

Don't pretend like Wikipedia doesn't depend on donations from primarily capitalist economy citizens. Just because an organization is non-profit does not mean it's anti-capitalist, or commons-based. It is still a private organization run by private individuals. They just don't distribute profits to shareholders and their business model is donation-based, just as churches have been for centuries.

I agree that there's a lot of promise for open source resources like Linux, Wikipedia, and Bitcoin, but I see that there's also a great trade-off between Cathedral vs. Bazaar style production.

kragen21• 7 years ago

I don't know why you would suggest I was pretending that? The rest of your comment seems like an irrelevant rebuttal to something I didn't even suggest, except that you seem to not know what "commons-based" means, so you falsely assert that Wikipedia isn't commons-based [peer production product].

Capitalism is a system of production in which productive work is carried out by employees using means of production, such as factories, that are the private property of a capitalist that employs them, and that capitalist is the owner of the work product. Linux is largely produced this way, although originally it was produced by commons-based peer production, and so, for that matter, is the Internet Archive; Wikipedia and LAPACK largely are not. The distinction doesn't have anything to do with non-profit corporations; whether the capitalist is a non-profit corporation or a private citizen doesn't really affect the system of production much.

"Non-capitalist" doesn't mean "anti-capitalist". Capitalism wasn't anti-feudalism either! I mean, except in the sense that in Europe the nascent capitalist cities often gained independence from the feudal system, and eventually capitalist power structures became more influential than feudal ones and displaced them after a few centuries, but in that sense everything is anti-everything-else.

Very few people are less anti-capitalist than Jimmy Wales.

Balgair• 7 years ago

Mom cried.

She used to be a librarian. Then she was a geographer. The old school kind, the one that actually drew actual maps. The librarian skills really came in handy when drawing real maps. Everything had to be right. People could get lost in the wilderness and be using your map, or countries could be drawing international borders based on your map, war could break out over your mistakes. The printers and early dot-matrix printers put her whole department out of business though. That was fine, my siblings and I came along about then anyway.

I was too young to remember, but I think it was Encarta 95. I remember standing there next to Mom as she fired up the new program, my sister sat on her lap. She wasn't very tech savy, still isn't. We helped her out a bit with the mouse and clicking into everything.

We looked up East Germany first thing. Mom wanted to make sure Encarta was correct, right, true. We knew East Germany wasn't a thing anymore, even though a lot of the maps in school and in our children's books were saying it still was a thing. It took a while back then for things to percolate. Mom wanted to make sure this thing was as up to date as possible.

She typed it in, it took us to an index page, Mom clicked on the top listing (I think). We read a bit about East Germany. It had an end date. Mom was happy. This resource will do for her family. Then there was a bit of text that was underlined. Mom hovered over the underlined text. It said to click on the underlined text to go to that page. My sister squirmed a bit.

Mom clicked and then the internet came crashing into our house like an asteroid or an artillery shell or an earthquake; the floor was left behind. Everything changed in an instant.

It took us, automatically, to the linked page. I think I was about unified Germany. But it did it instantly. Boom, there you were. Reading.

Mom cried.

It was at that moment that Mom understood. No more card catalogs. No more having to hunt the shelves. No more having to look in the index for the page numbers, jamming your fingers in the back while you flipped through the tome. No more walking and sitting back down. No more having to ask strangers to watch your bags while you went diving into the stacks. No more checked out books you were looking for.

Just. Click. And. Read.

I asked her what was wrong. My sister was not happy with Mom crying. Mom was a bit flabberghasted. She told me about all the effort that went into just getting the information, all the time you lost, all the excitment that drained. And how that was no more. How it was so easy to read and to learn, now. The world was going to be so good for her children, for me, for my sister and my other siblings.

Mom cried in joy.

wazoox• 7 years ago

In 1993 I participated a contest with my girlfriend. We needed to find lots of factoids in literature, for instance we had a phrase from some obscure book and needed to find what book it belonged too; then a longer block of text from Proust, but which book? In fact the passage (about Venice, its tiled roofs) is present at two places in "la Recherche", but with a couple of words changed. Another thing to find was the mystery component of a mint julep as per Mark Twain.

We spent something like two weeks at the library, thumbing through hundreds of books (all of Mark Twain, all of Borges, all of Proust, and some others). All of this would be a 20 minutes search nowadays.

dredmorbius7• 7 years ago

... and even in 1995, this was a 50-year-old dream, finally realised:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

slac• 7 years ago

Jake Knapp, a designer that started his career on Encarta, gave a huge nod to the product journey in his Design Sprint talk in london a while back.

https://vimeo.com/233941079

teekert• 7 years ago

I loved Encarta (it must have been 1997 or so?)! I must have watched that double split experiment animation on quantum mechanics dozens of times! It felt like looking the Universe into its soul... It may even have contributed to me becoming a scientist.

Edit: Found the movie!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnhqqISBSA

jumelles• 7 years ago

I have dreams of Wikidata eventually being leveraged to enable similar interactivity. Currently Wikidata can store plenty of information, but there's no reason it shouldn't keep growing. Right now items already often have dates and coordinates - creating interactive maps and timelines is theoretically just a matter of implementation. Ideally, though, I want Wikidata to be so much more: why shouldn't it contain historical weather data? TV listings? Sports results? Having all of this available in an open and structured format would make all sorts of things possible, and I think we're only scratching the surface.

The other big "problem" with Wikipedia is copyright (and it's certainly not Wikipedia's fault), but there's a surprising amount of public domain work (thanks to many governments, especially the US) and of course tons of user-submitted work that ranges from bad to incredible. Other language Wikipedias can actually be more restrictive - there's no "fair use" on Japanese Wikipedia so logos are often blurred.

leoxvi3• 7 years ago

I am having fun developing an alternative interface for Wikipedia called "Explore":

https://wikischool.org/explore

https://wikischool.org/explore/Ludwig%20Wittgenstein?l=en&t=... (read an article chronologically)

The larger goal is to make self-study more effective and enjoyable. Desktop browser recommended for now, as the mobile UX needs improvement.

bearbin• 7 years ago

I had a short browse and I was really impressed by how much nicer to read you have managed to make wikipedia. Normally I much prefer static HTML to whatever mess the latest javascript framework manages to conjure up but what you've done really seems to work.

The text actually fills the screen rather than just hiding in the gutter on the left, and even though you've removed most styling cues around links and actions, it's done in a way that it's still obvious what everything does, so the main content can be clearer.

The dynamic sidebar table of contents is also particularly effective - on desktop, everybody has a widescreen monitor now and it's disappointing now few sites take advantage of it.

My only two critical points are your choice of typeface, which is awful and significantly degrades the experience (browsing with fonts turned off is a great improvement), and the speed - not only does clicking a link take several seconds to do something but there isn't really any indication whether things are happening or not.

leoxvi3• 7 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. There will be a "font-switch" option and I may need to do some user testing for the best default font.

The speed issue is really a Wikipedia (and Archive.org) API fetching issue plus some parsing time. I am planning to make the data fetching parallel, but need to do some data-source-code refactoring first. A better loading indication UI will also help.

mohn• 7 years ago

Nice! I like this idea and look forward to seeing it develop further.

A bug to report: inspired by comments elsewhere in this thread, I searched for "radiation", and your interface is rendering the bulleted list about different kinds of radiation above the actual first paragraph (which ends with "This includes:" to introduce the list).

leoxvi3• 7 years ago

Yes, noted, thanks. Some wikipedia templates are difficult to get right. Will see how to fix this and make the presentation clearer.

joblessjunkie5• 7 years ago

Encarta was part of my first job out of university. I worked in Microsoft's Multimedia Division, tasked with creating the first video and audio drivers for Windows. IIRC the BMP, WAV, and AVI file formats all came from this team at about this time.

In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC with an early CD-ROM drive to demo an early build of Encarta at a trade show. It was a lot of effort to find a combination of hardware and drivers that would work reliably together.

Encarta itself (at least at that time) was written as a Word document. Hyperlinks were defined using footnotes, and animation and audio placeholders were defined with custom OLE objects. The whole thing got exported as RTF and fed to a compiler, which created the runtime data structures optimized for CD-ROM access and that also built a full-text search index. The compilation was very slow and required huge amounts of RAM.

Around this time, the team had some awareness of HTML as one of many emerging hypertext markup languages, but the internet was still a few years away and no one knew what format would "win" for hypertext. In any case, there were no tools or browsers at all, so we had to build everything -- including our own search engine for the CD-ROM.

akgoel• 7 years ago

This basically sounds like WinHelp, which was a compiled format of RTF, prior to the availability of HTML.

jenscow• 7 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking.

That was a pain - I think I ended up writing RTF by hand.

joblessjunkie5• 7 years ago

It was in fact exactly that. The WinHelp team got folded into our group, and then WinHelp became something of an orphaned project for a while (or maybe forever?).

simonh3• 7 years ago

I was on a mailing list for a 'fanzine' in the 90's that was actually mailed around as a WinHelp file. It was actually really nice.

SuoDuanDao• 7 years ago

Hey, thanks for your work! I got a CD-ROM holding Encarta '95 for Christmas when I was in grade school and I loved it - spent a lot of time on that program over the years, and it really helped develop my love of learning.

mixmastamyk2• 7 years ago

In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC

Interesting, as the 486 came out in late '89. Seems you'd like a little more oomph, but perhaps they were too expensive at the time.

joblessjunkie5• 7 years ago

One product design goal was to run on the mass market 386 PCs of the time.

It wasn't so much about oomph as it was about buggy device drivers that would inevitably blue screen at some point, or flaky CD-ROM drives that just never seemed to read the same data twice the same way.

SideburnsOfDoom• 7 years ago

Seems you'd like a little more oomph

Seems like a case of "high-spec dev machine" vs "example target device".

1stcity3rdcoast• 7 years ago

A good point, so I just looked it up. This April 1991 ad [0] shows 386 desktops with a hard drive at around $2000 in 1991 prices, and the comparable 486 models with a hard drive start at $7300.

To put that in perspective, $2000 in 1991 is $3700 in today’s dollars, and the 486 would be a staggering $13,500 today.

[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/InfoWorld.html?id=0FAEA...

fallensatan• 7 years ago

I just want to thank you for your work on Encarta. It was the first _real software_ I interacted with in my teen years; it fascinated me a lot back then and I believe it’s part of the reason I’m in software industry. Thank you.

cptaj• 7 years ago

I definitely poured hours into Encarta as well. I was already a big fan of computers but I do wonder how much of an impact Encarta had on me. It definitely built up that early browsing habit that translated so seamlessly into the web.

elboru• 7 years ago

This kind of comment is the exact reason why I keep coming back to HN. It's great to read stories of real people who have worked in all kinds of amazing and inspiring projects, thanks for sharing your experience with us, it's always nice to read about technical details of legendary software.

cvhashim• 7 years ago

Right. I used to spend hours on encarta as a kid :)

hoyd• 7 years ago

Totally agree

hollerith2• 7 years ago

the internet was still a few years away

Internet history fairy here to make sure people know that the internet has been in continuous operation since 1969 [1]. (And DARPA started funding research for the express purpose of creating a global computer network in 1960.)

What was still a few years away in '91 is awareness or interest in the internet by a significant fraction of consumers (or by Bill Gates for that matter).

[1]: Some people would deny the name "internet" to any network prior to the introduction of the internet protocol suite in 1982, but it was the same user-visible services (email, ftp, telnet, netnews, etc) running on both the earlier network that began operation in 1969 and the later network that some want to reserve the name "internet" for. In other words, the switch in 1983 from NCP to TCP/IP was mostly transparent to users.

joblessjunkie5• 7 years ago

You are of course correct; mea culpa.

We had internet; what we didn't yet have was HTTP.

bootlooped• 7 years ago

I didn't have Encarta, I had the lite version, Microsoft Bookshelf. I recall it being a major help on many junior high and maybe even high school homework assignments. It had a dictionary, thesaurus and a mini encyclopedia! It was decidedly less than Encarta, but it still inspired a sense of wonder and amazement in at least one young person.

NeoBasilisk• 7 years ago

The only thing I really remember was that MindMaze game.

rkimmel• 7 years ago

I don’t miss Microsoft anything.

Maultasche• 7 years ago

I know a lot of people here have fond memories of Encarta, but I found it to be a disappointment. When my family first got a copy of it with a new computer I was probably about 16 at the time (around 1994 I think) and I was excited to explore it.

I found that it had only very basic information and didn't go into any detail. I was very disappointed because I was expecting so much more information about the topics I looked at and the multimedia elements just seemed to be there to show off the technology rather than actually be useful. I put it away and never looked at Encarta again. I know wonder if there was useful information that I never found because I didn't spend enough time looking at it.

I also found many paper encyclopedias to be disappointing as well, and were only useful for giving me a short summary when I knew absolutely nothing about a topic. I really enjoyed the special Encyclopedia Britannica volumes with more in-depth articles on a smaller number of topics. Those were much better than the regular volumes with minimal information.

I think I wanted to learn so much more about the topics I was interested in, and information was hard for me to find in those days. Only my local public library had books the sufficient depth of knowledge to make me happy.

If I had known about the amazing skills of professional librarians back then, I would have had a librarian help me find information. At the time, I just thought that they were there to shelve books and check them out to people and had little other skills.

nudpiedo• 7 years ago

When I use google maps or google earth sometimes I still miss the encarta’s globe rule to visually measure distances between two spots.

imulligan• 7 years ago

I remember Encarta because I too had those CDs. Wow. I completely forgot about Encarta. Perhaps MS should update and distribute

axiomdata316• 7 years ago

I remember the cool woosh sound the menus made in Encarta. I also loved the interface that seemed to make it stand out from other Windows applications. I opened up the dlls in Borland C++ to look at the artwork that made up Encarta!

kccqzy• 7 years ago

Encarta was one of the few pieces of software that I actually bought when I was a kid. (Slightly embarrassed to admit that as a kid with no income and parents not willing to buy software for me, piracy was a thing.) That was how important it was to me. I felt a fantastic sense of wonder reading through it and felt that I could really be a better person through all this knowledge on my computer.

hackworks• 7 years ago

During my undergrad (Mechanical) years (mid 90s), we had 1 computer running MS Windows 3.1 (IIRC). We had a demo version of Encarta and it had a huge (by 90s standard) collection of midi files.

I would enter the lab and start playing all files before starting work on my project - Developing software for Finite Element Analysis. It was like an old gramaphone playing the same tunes everyday and others in the lab hated me.

Since I would get in first, I had the right to start the player :-)

jpamata• 7 years ago

I think I was 7 when I first got hold of it. It was installed on my Dad's work laptop and since using it, I would beg him every week to leave his laptop at home. Among my memories was spending time going over the virtual tours. Encarta had this feature that allowed you to take either a 360 tour, or a full immersive 3D virtual tour of a historical building. I remember my favourites being the Abu Simbel and Persepolis tours. Another feature I miss were the interactive quizzes (only available on Encarta Kids) and that creepy trivia game. One of my past times as a kid was going home from school and studying for these quizzes, reading dozens upon dozens of Encarta articles then later trying my luck on beating my high score. A couple years later, we finally got internet connection and the hobby died down. While the internet provided a wider library of knowledge, it never gave me a platform to cultivate and test my interest for devouring trivias as much as Encarta.

sombremesa• 7 years ago

Reading this thread makes it clear that there was (and perhaps still is) one market where Encarta beat modern Wikipedia hands down - children.

tetrisgm• 7 years ago

That’s a perfect summary. So many apps for kids are just designed to sell them entertainment as micro transactions. This was a useful and informative piece of software, made accessible. I know Wikipedia has a simple mode, but it’s not the same.

vturner• 7 years ago

I don't remember Encarta but we had Sierra's Britannica and then later another (can't recall the name). I remember reading the articles particularly the ones on transistors and radio circuits as I was getting interested in electronics with fondness. There is something there in the limited scope that developed a persistence in me. If I was going to understand the transistor and build a toy radio, I had to understand THAT article and the few others I might find in a real encyclopedia around the house or maybe an article I got online. I wonder how my children might develop such persistence with information availability we now enjoy?

IAmGraydon• 7 years ago

Nostalgia can have some very strange effects.

tr33house• 7 years ago

Good memories: songs like "take me back to Jamaica where I belong" and "my brothers do it best in my mother's TV"

Encarta was really one of the few ways I got to learn about the world before we had internet in our home (this was around 05 when we were living in E Africa). Thank you to everyone that made it happen

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

"Most folks at Microsoft don't realize that Encarta exists and is used TODAY all over the developing world on disconnected or occasionally connected computers. (Perhaps Microsoft could make the final version of Encarta available for a free final download so that we might avoid downloading illegal or malware infested versions?)"

Give it to Wikipedia gratis, then they can make Encarta the Wikipedia entry for Encarta.

anonytrary• 7 years ago

I remember growing up with Encarta's 3D tours of historical sites. Those were seriously awesome.

asimpletune• 7 years ago

Encarta had a really cool intro song and animation that I just loved growing up. Also, I vaguely remember kind of like some sort of maze mini-game, but I can’t remember much about it

penguinlinux• 7 years ago

off topic: If you have a raspberry pi zero w and a large SD card you can download kiwix an offline wikipedia reader that has a built in webserver. It is amazing how you can download wikidedia full or subsets of it and have it running out of a raspi w zero. I am working on a walkthrough on how to do it so I will be posting an article soon.

dingaling• 7 years ago

You don't need an RPi, kiwix is available for desktop OS as well as phones.

Why carry around another device instead of the computer in your pocket?

Menchon• 7 years ago

Some people do not want to block that much storage on their phone, but usually for Raspberry Pi the use case is that you can pretty much broadcast Wikipedia within a classroom without the need for an install on each and every device (it may also be kinda cool to have your own private Wikipedia network at home so nobody knows you are browsing this or that topic - I know Stallman mentioned using Kiwix once).

jve• 7 years ago

In my 30ties, using PC since Windows 95 but FITST TIME ever I hear of this software. Maybe because Games were more interesting. Or maybe because I barely knew english.

But never ever did I hear anyone mentioning it.

Just thought I'll let you all know.

timwaagh2• 7 years ago

They could absolutely still sell this if they focused a bit on kids learning and minigames. Maybe sell it on steam instead of dvds. Information is no longer quite enough, but infotainment is still a huge market.

Zenst• 7 years ago

I remember Encarta for its pioneering use of fractal image compression (whatever happened on that front), I recall reading a rather in depth article in BYTE magazine prior to the Encarta usage and thought, wow, and yet, it's one tech that seems to stagnated.

ThomPete• 7 years ago

Then build it. I’d donate.

jpkeisala• 7 years ago

Didn't Encarta try to close Wikipedia? Or do I remember wrong?

max23_• 7 years ago

It was one of the first software I had when I got my first computer. To me it was the internet and I spent hours reading all the entries and interacting with the audio and video that come with it.

karthickshiva• 7 years ago

The word Encarta brings back many nostalgic memories of me. Back in my childhood, I found a folder of Encarta's files, where all the videos used in articles was located. That folder contains thousands of videos. I edit those videos using Windows Movie Maker, add some music and add titles and credits. Then I will show my creation to my friends and guests come to my house. When they praise, I feel myself like a big movie editor.

tjpnz• 7 years ago

My first real computer when I was a kid came with Encarta and Dangerous Creatures. I spent hours on those things and when I couldn't I would be brainstorming what to look up next. I'm not sure what the equivalent of that would be now, but it sure is upsetting to see what kids are using technology for now - shitty YouTube videos with questionable visuals, mobile games with predatory micro transactions and gambling mechanics, no doubt covertly collecting data on them.

cftorres• 7 years ago

I can't remember in which version of encarta, but when I was young I spent hours on those 3D recreations of famous places travels. I live in a developing country and the access for internet was too expensive, encarta was the best alternative to do my homeworks, find cool images to print, and have a look of the world. It would be great it could become free for the development of those kids that still don't have access for good quality information.

iconjack• 7 years ago

I worked on Encarta in the mid 90s. Here are a few tidbits you may or may not find interesting.

* The content was based on Funk & Wagnalls. Then we had a bunch of editors and writers cleaning up the content and adding new articles.

* The Windows version was always done first, then we ported to the Mac using "WLM" (Windows Library for Mac?).

* We used fractal compression for the images. If you never heard of this, look it up—pretty interesting. This was going to be all the rage, but then it wasn't.

* As a consumer product, Christmas sales were everything. Therefore, unlike most software, the schedule never slipped. There was a hard date for completion. Features would be cut to make the deadline, no matter what.

* When the web hit, we put professionally curated links into the articles. Best of both worlds. And you could get a subscription that would update articles and links monthly.

* We worked with WBUR to implement a brand-new closed captioning standard for videos.

* The codebase was ostensibly C++ and MFC, but it..was..complicated.

* Articles were edited in Word, with a bunch of custom macros, and exported to RTF. There was a lot more processing that went on after that to shove all that content onto the CD, but I wasn't too familiar with that part.

* Later versions occupied more than one CD. Swapping was a real pain, but if you had multiple CD-ROM drives, it would accommodate you.

I Miss Microsoft Encarta

Related Stories