That whole period of the PC industry where 'multimedia' became mainstream was pretty magical. I know the Amiga was well ahead of the PC ecosystem for a long time in capability but it never hit schools (at least where I grew up in South Australia) like PCs did. So with the emergence of VGA and Super VGA, widespread availability (and relative affordability) of 486 DX class PCs, Soundblasters and Optical Drives, the PC overran the other home computers.
Games and applications were evolving at break-neck speed and the pace of change really made you feel anything was possible. Encarta was really a product of that time.
If you were doing primary / secondary school during the 90s, you'd have had to do projects where paper encyclopaedias were your primary resource. For me in a rural school it wasn't until the mid 90s we had 486PCs with CDROM drives and going from Britannica to the searchable rich media database that was Encarta was a massive force multiplier. It was a remarkable demonstration of how positive an effect technology could have on the learning experience.
One thing I remember from those times : even knowing there was an encyclopedia on the school library computer, I would not use it, because it just sounded impractical. I would need to ask for permission to use the computer, then wait for it to start, then figure how to do a search, while the competitive proposition was just picking the encyclopedia volume for the correct letter and finding my page!
How much a few decades can change… I would call painful the idea of manually looking for a page in a book rather than doing a computer search, nowadays.
Me too - since the rise of ad-funded SEO 'content farms', it's become damn hard to find information written by someone who has even a passing familiarity with the topic.
This is largely my attitude right now. I may have also described the current internet as "giant steaming shithole" a time or two because it's so polluted with dubious information and algorithmically generated content.
At the same time I've been going through some old books (mid-19th century) that were in my grandfather's house. There are some that cover extremely specific subject matters. They are well indexed, so that finding good information might indeed be easier than googling for it. I'm not saying that it's superior to internet search, but sometimes we forget that there is actually information that has never been digitized.
The internet is actually good for 19th century books. It's very rare that I can't find what I want on books.google.com. It's the early 20th century where the problems start.
Although if you are after focus and depth, arguably you would be reading some sort of primary source rather than an encyclopedia. I've definitely been at a library, had a quick question on something tangentially related to what I'm reading, and pulled up Wikipedia on my phone to quickly look something up. I wouldn't want to read a whole book on a phone, since I agree with you that I can more easily absorb information from an actual book. That being said, looking up something on my phone is far less distracting than having to get up, put the book down, and go over to look something up in an encyclopedia or dictionary.
In our country there are no public libraries, you only get access to a library during high school and university studies. When Microsoft Encarta arrived it was amazing because of the animations and color images but content is shorter compared to the ones on the libraries. Internet changed everything on information availability.
There's still one thing that I absolutely prefer looking for a page in a book rather than searching online, and that's recipes for cooking. I can't stand scrolling through pages of people telling me about the history of this thing they cooked while ads are popping up to get to the actual recipe.
And if anyone has any suggestions for better places online to look for recipes, I'd be happy to have them! I like Cooking for Engineers [0] but still usually use a book.
I don't mind the useless life story that accompanies every recipe these days. It's easy enough to scroll to the bottom of the page. I virtually never make any given recipe as-is anyway, and if it's something I'm going to make repeatedly I have my own document template that I use to write up the recipe and save it locally.
I can't remember the last time I used a paper recipe, and I find it strange to attribute a preference to paper to an easily avoidable side-effect of internet recipe blogging.
Check out eatyourbooks.com. It's a digital, searchable index of your paper books so you can look for recipes featuring "ras al hanout", for example, and it will tell you which books you own have recipes with that ingredient.
We had a very permissive culture around the PC equipment, pretty much if a computer was free you could use it. There was no authentication or use policies. That did change towards the end of my schooling when networking and internet access was finally rolled out. Novell Netware ruined everything!
I remember in second and third grade we had the same thing, except, we were running pentium 2 and 3 machines around 1998. Our school lab had about 20-25 pc's, and all of them ran windows xp.
We filled every conceivable space on those machines with pirated copies of gameboy emulators and various pokemon roms.
It became a game of, will the computer admins ever realise, and if they do, will they do anything about it.
Long story short, they gave up trying to police it after about a year, when no matter what they tried, we always found another way to get the games back, in the process of course we learned quite a bit about computing (happy accident? Who cares, my love of computers started in that stupid class)
I think your memories may be merging over time. Win XP didn't come out till 2001, so it was probably win 98/98 SE running in your classroom.
One of the things I remember about school computing in the 90s was how varied the equipment could be. My school had 2-3 computers per classroom, but 2nd grade had Apple IIs, 3rd grade had... possibly an Amiga?, and 4,5,6 grade had a mix of IBM PCs and one Mac, but with what ever OS originally shipped on them, ranging from straight DOS + Windows <3, win 3.1, and Win 95. It was wacky.
It's interesting, I split my childhood between Hungary and South Africa, and pretty much along the timeline of the 486. During the late 80s in Hungary, the Amiga certainly was a big thing, even in schools. I suspect it was due to the price; even an Amiga was considered super expensive, and if you ran into a PC it was either at your parents' work or similar, and it would have been a 286 or worse.
Although I suppose the 486 came out in '89, it was rare to see it in the schools that I went to, or in my friends' homes. Similarly with VGA and SVGA (and decent sound cards!), it took several years to become affordable and mainstream. But when they did, and when Pentiums started coming out, it was pretty much the death knell for the Amiga. I recall somberly looking at benchmarks of 486s, and comparing it to our pride and joy, a 68030-upgraded A1200, and realising that it was a losing game.
So you are absolutely right, though I think the timeline is probably a bit shifted depending on the country / economic conditions.
Even 386 was absolutely crushing A1200 in some respects. In Amigas, you had to set every bit of a pixel separately, which didn't hurt for 2D games with static art assets (which you just copied from memory onto the screen), but it was a killer for anything 3D based. In result, you could have a 386 run Doom IIRC, whereas 3d shooters on Amiga 1200 were much worse than even Wolfenstein 3D.
Oh yes, and Wolfenstein actually ran quite well even on a 286. Higher res and framerate than same time period Amiga titles. Aside from the additional inefficiency you mentioned, I think 3D is an area where none of the Amiga's specialised hardware chipsets helped (or at least, nowhere near enough / as much as they did with 2D), and the CPU performance disparity started to really show.
Amiga stopped investing/improving their unique hardware chipset and PC's simply overcame that deficiency by sheer CPU power and improved graphics output standards (EGA->VGA).
Hmm, to me the term "multimedia PC" already sounded outdated from the start, similar to the "a CD ROM can contain a whole library shelf worth of data" hype.
I just thought like, this 386 PC could make sound and graphics and games. This Pentium can do it too, granted with more colors and a CD ROM drive and a fancy "where do you want to go today" movie, but does that warrant all this hype of being called "multimedia"?
Oh well, that was the 90s, things moved so fast then so of course things would sound outdated and cheesy very fast.
> "a CD ROM can contain a whole library shelf worth of data" hype
CD-ROMs were pretty incredible for their time. Remember that when they became mainstream around 1994, hard drives were only 200 MB and floppies were 1.44 MB, so they really were game changing.
Not as cringeworthy as Bill Gates' book in the 90s opting to entirely use that term, abbreviating it to "the Highway," and outright refusing to say "Internet."
Exactly. Back then it seemed like a word that people not much into the computer scene or non-specialist magazines would use, while to geeks the word was a joke.
I agree. Even today I would be very reluctant to use the term "multimedia" because it sounds very dusty and boring to me. I would use "audiovisual" or something else in its place.
Though it's not really necessary to call this out anymore, seeing as virtually every corner of computing is capable of a whizz-bang multimedia experience and has been for a long time.
Even today I would be very reluctant to use the term "multimedia" because it sounds very dusty and boring to me. I would use "audiovisual" or something else in its place.
A term from the 1990's sounds dusty compared to one from the 1950's? Interesting.
I remember when my dad bought us a copy of Encarta, I think around 2001. It had a click-and-drag Streetview style walkthrough of historical sites, including, iirc, the Great Pyramids.
I thought that was the most incredible thing ever. I remember getting my friends over after school and absolutely blowing their minds.
Yes. Also, the Encarta world map on CD I had was desirable enough to swap for a Pentium (120 or 133 MHz I believe) and some rare original IBM PC-AT chassis parts (; Encarta was an early pre-Web hypertext system from the 1992/3 multimedia/HyTime-esque era that wouldn't look bad even today. Some insiders here to share some tech internals?
I grabbed a copy of Encarta '97 at a street market in Kuala Lumpur for all of $3. I was 11 and it blew my mind how much info there was in it. Despite also buying FIFA '97 at shop, I looked forward to coming home from school and firing up a new article. They had a audio and video too!
It's hard to explain just how incredible it was to have this info all in one place in the pre-internet age. Even today, I'd say having this kind of validated information as an integrated product offers a superior way to learn compared to Googling random articles and watching ad-ridden Youtube videos.
Maybe this is the 2020-itis talking, but I can't imagine watching the moon landing or MLK's speech online without mentally preparing myself for the rudeness and straight up lunacy in the comments section.
I had a similar experience with Encarta at a similar age -- in the US, in perhaps in a far more privileged environment -- but it hit me the same way.
Encarta was great because it curated and presented information intentionally. Everything was in one place. You didn't get lost in rabbit holes or overwhelmed by information overload. You didn't get distracted by Instagram.
It's so obvious that it barely needs to be said, but giving a kid a well-crafted learning experience is better than just throwing them into the deep end of the internet.
I remember in elementary school some student asked why race cars make that distinct zooming noise as they race past. The teacher didn't know, but I was able to go to the front of the class and explain the Doppler effect based on an interactive lesson I had watched on MS Encarta.
> Maybe this is the 2020-itis talking, but I can't imagine watching the moon landing or MLK's speech online without mentally preparing myself for the rudeness and straight up lunacy in the comments section.
Don't ever scroll down to comments on YouTube or news articles. Possibly maybe peek if the video or article is very niche; the tail comments can be worthy, but the head will only make you feel bad.
Encarta (1993-2009) was a big inspiration to start the Conzept encyclopedia project. Still much more to do to reach the audio-visual wow-factor and sheer fun that Encarta had, especially for children.
Conzept is an attempt to create an encyclopedia for the 21st century. A modern topic-exploration tool based on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Open Library, GBIF and other information sources.
There are also various screenshots of the feature progress on Twitter which give a sense of what is already possible: https://twitter.com/conzept__
For the future I am also looking into adding some WebXR enhancements (such as eg. for more immersive image viewing) and some form of social meetups around topics.
> A modern topic-exploration tool based on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Open Library, GBIF and other information sources.
I find Wikipedia is increasingly relying upon meta-circular authority. Ie, a Wiki article will cite an expert who cites another expert who cites Wikipedia, and so ultimately the Wikipedia article is using itself as an authoritative source.
Or the authority is fragile. Ie, the wiki article will cite a trusted source who in turn cites some Tweets as their authoritative source.
Or the authority is broken. Ie, the wiki article will cite a trusted source who cites sources that are no longer present on the Internet, and so Wikipedia's broken link discovery fails.
Is it possible not to rely upon Wikipedia as a primary source for your articles?
However, this is an issue to be watchful of indeed, as Wikipedia grows ever larger and gets used more and more.
See also http://wikicite.org (storing citations in Wikidata) which could help bring in better citation (quality) tools. Scholia is an interesting project using that citation data: https://scholia.toolforge.org/
> The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations which assert that 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden engaged in corrupt activities while the former was Vice President of the United States and the latter worked for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. The conspiracy theory centers around the allegation that then-Vice President Biden withheld loan guarantees to pressure Ukraine into firing a prosecutor so as to prevent a corruption investigation into Burisma and to protect his son. Although Biden did withhold government aid to pressure Ukraine into removing the prosecutor, this was the official foreign policy of the United States government as it believed the prosecutor to be too lenient in investigating corruption; this position was also supported by American allies. A New York Post article published in October 2020 brought renewed attention to the allegations; its veracity was strongly questioned elsewhere.
These statements are "problematic" in a number of ways, and the whole situation (of which this is just one example) is that most people seem to believe that what is recorded on Wikipedia is necessarily factual. It's bad enough that we have this same problem with the media, but at least some people realize that the media is biased. Wikipedia on the other hand, is more of a "record of history" and is typically considered (despite "official" (unread) policies advising otherwise) to be an unbiased ~authoritative snapshot of the state of reality.
The fact of the matter is, the complete truth of what has occurred here is unknown, and it's quite interesting from a psychological perspective how otherwise logical people are very uncomfortable with that truth. <NULL> in a database column is accepted by the mind with no resistance - <NULL> in the real world is very often rejected extremely strongly by the very same mind. It would be interesting to see what mankind might achieve if we were able to find a way to not turn our eyes (and minds) away from such phenomena when they manifest.
Encarta was an amazing product that I fondly remember using in school. It was essentially wikipedia before there was wikipedia with the upside that it had curated and citable sources and generally a much higher quality of writing.
In my eyes, over the years, wikipedia has caught up a lot in terms of quality of writing and wikimedia now has a lot of images and video.
I wonder if there is a way to just download the whole wikipedia for easy distribution like encarta.
Part of the value of Encarta was in the human curation of what was interesting.
Wikipedia includes (by necessity) everything — but an encyclopedia would probably devote more space to (say) Nigerian history than to (say) the in-game statistics of all ~1,000 Pokémon.
I suspect the sort of person who writes Wikipedia articles about Pokemon would not go and write articles about Nigerian history instead if Pokemon articles were not allowed, and vice versa. Wikipedia contributions are not really a zero sum game.
I think the point was that if you are looking at a subject where the relative importance is less obvious than Pokemon vs Nigerian politics then you could gauge importance implicitly from the existence of the article in a curated encyclopedia - not that contributers should be forced to spend more time on more important topics.
Well, for storage (and thus offline) purposes it is of course exactly a zero sum game. I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images.
However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.
> I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images.
There are several offline snapshots of different sizes of Wikipedia that do exactly this. Some of them are more thoroughly curated, others are a snapshot of the most popular articles, etc.
What I could not find easily was a full English Wikipedia with images and all available in an easily accessible format (like the Kiwix snapshots). I'd put a whole hard disk for this purpose, because the size is in the gigabyte-terabyte range.
In terms of space, the text is over 1000x smaller than the multimedia: ~20GB (uncompressed) for the text vs ~45TB (compressed) for multimedia (est accounting for growth vs 23TB@2014).
I am aware that there are various offline wikipedia compilations and I am grateful they exist and to the people who work on them, but last I looked using them looked like a bit of pain, and on checking again that still appears to be the case. I get the impression that if I want to have something of decent quality that fits into the 10s of GiB range I'd consider reasonable¹, I'd have to manually munge together several non-Pokemon topics I consider important plus one of the text only dumps. This would be more palatable if I had a strong impression that once I hit upon a working process I could rinse-and-repeat on a yearly basis.
Do you have any experience with this?
¹E.g. the 100k top article page linked by sibling does not look super promising, ~700 math articles vs ~10k fluff (sports, entertainment etc.).
I have the ~80GB "full english" snapshot I grabbed some time ago and use with Kiwix. It's not quite "full", it doesn't have quite all images and video, etc. But the size is still reasonable for a desktop/laptop PC.
I also have a 10GB snapshot on my phone, but it's a bit lacking. I don't have enough storage on my phone to fit the bigger one. But a battery powered offline Wikipedia is high on my list of necessary things in case things go south.
I haven't found a great way to keep these synced up, glad to hear if someone has a good solution for up-to-date offline wikipedia.
Well, I was hoping for less than 93GiB compressed, given that this exceeds the storage capacity of several devices I'd like to use it on and I'd estimate the total amount of info I care about to be far smaller than that. And small is beautiful: if everything fits into ram, you can do various interesting data munging tasks on the data (which is after all not uninteresting) very quickly.
I remember a similar comparison with Tony Blair back when he was the Prime Minister of the UK; the response was that while Wikipedia did indeed say more about Pikachu than Blair, Wikipedia also said more about Blair than did whichever “proper” encyclopaedia Wikipedia was being compared with at the time.
I just don't get why doesn't it matter . for what it is Pokemon is a game and in some ways a form of art, and since many humans are interested in it deeply that means that it is important to them. I think it is important human knowledge, there is no need to be elitest about it.
And yet there's a ton of information that is rejected from Wikipedia itself, which found a place on e.g. Wikia and a few other sites like that - mainly about gaming, but also about subjects like D&D, etc.
I recall reading that there was a time the Wikipedia article on the lightsaber was longer than the article on the printing press. No longer the case, thankfully.
“Kiwix is an offline reader for online content like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access. The software as well as the content is free to use for anyone.”
Indeed, Kiwix is the proper solution for anyone who cares about knowledge access in places where internet connection is spotty. Given the file format it uses (zim) is compressed, and meant to be accessed compressed to pluck a specific article, you can have all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB. Plus, the specs of the file format are published and it's easy to build your own implementation, I did it for my needs.
It's also great for privacy maximalists : I have wikipedia, wikisource and wiktionary in two languages locally, which means that most of my searches never leave my computer.
Kiwix/openzim don't provide only mediawiki projects either, I've recently downloaded stackoverflow's content (although, I'll need to build a dedicated search engine for it to be really usable).
> all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB
36GB seems like a really big number if it's just text. A cursory Google search says 1MB will hold about 500 pages of text (ignoring compression). So 36GB would be something like 18 million pages? Let's say a 1000 page book is 10cm wide, so 18M pages wind up as 1800 meters of books, or 180 meter-wide bookshelves with 10 shelves each, which is maybe a large library? It seems like a lot of that must be external sources. I wonder what percentage was actually written by Wikipedia editors?
Not sure what you mean with external sources, but I have seen nothing but user generated content in there (but I haven't read all wikipedia articles, obviously).
A few things to note, though:
1/ it's not pure text content, it's html content, this has a significant overhead
2/ a zim file is not just compressed content, but also huge indexes referencing where is which content. You look for your article's title in the reference table, you find the position of your article in the file and you decompress just that part. This is what allows for selective decompression without decompressing the whole content.
The zim file format is far from ideal for compression efficiency - all the best algorithms typically don't allow random access without decompressing everything.
Also, wikipedia has a lot of spam and orphan pages, insanely long lists, etc. Those are hard to algorithmically filter out.
I used this in Cuba. It was immensely useful, both to pass the time, and to look up many things of interest along the way without waiting to go to an internet zone.
I was a passenger in a car driving through central Cuba and thought I saw a sign towards Australia. Breaking out Kiwix I found the article and was relieved to see I wasn't going crazy.
Later on I was in an Uber in Australia driven by a Cuban man, and I thought I'd impress my friends with my worldliness by mentioning that there's a town in Cuba called Australia. The driver furrowed his brows and said flatly "no there's not", much to their delight. Can't win em all!
In 2015 I was curious about the article distribution on Wikipedia so I scraped and visualized some data. At the time I was frustrated by the writing quality and I wanted to know how much of Wikipedia was 'quality' and how many of the 5 million articles were in subjects comparable to a general encyclopedia volume.
I don't know if miss Encarta but it does point out that in some ways Wikipedia feels like a step backward. Sure, wikipedia has more topics but where's a video? Where's the interactive explanations? Wikipedia feels like a 25yr old website. I know some people like that but it feels like a missed opportunity and stagnation to me
And while it's not interactive, there are definitely animations on Wikipedia to help understand concepts, like the top of the article on pi shows a circle unrolling:
As for truly interactive explanations... I'm not sure there's really any kind of technological standard for that right now that people could collaboratively edit. At least not in the way JPEG and SVG are available to everyone. Do you have any suggestions?
There actually are two methods of interactivity on Wikipedia right now, the Graph extension [0] and Kartographer. [1] With the first you can create charts, timelines, and histograms, based on Vega. With the second, you can add points on maps (with images), have shapes, and outlines, from OpenStreetMap. Unfortunately, both aren't used as much as they should because most are comfortable using other tools and baking things into PNGs, and these weren't advertised that heavily.
I also forgot to mention interactive 3D models in STL format. [0]
There's also a user who has done amazing work [1] with SVG files, but these mainly only work if you view the original file, as MediaWiki generates a static PNG thumbnail for SVG files (silly, but maybe was needed at some point for proper support).
I personally dont think vega has worked out that well. Its too low level to be used by wikipedians effectively but its too high level to make effective abstractions over. I think its a good first attempt but we really need a v2 interactivity plan.
That's really interesting! I had no idea, I've never actually come across an interactive graph in the wild on Wikipedia.
But when I think "interactivity", I think of things especially in articles about physics, math, or sciences generally -- pulling on a spring to show oscillation, showing how the angles of a triangle add up to 180°, a real-time dynamic water cycle, etc.
I'm assuming Vega can't do stuff like that? Is there any tool that can?
Yeah, that's a feature. I like that. No bloated JS framework taking 10 seconds to load, no obnoxious whitespace, minimal changes to the desktop experience when they implemented mobile. I admit they're a little slow to implement quality-of-life things (the hover-over preview being one of them). I also think link rot is a real problem too. Even though it's not necessarily their domain, I think Wikipedia should attempt to do something.
I worked at MS in the Multimedia group working on things like sound-card and CD-ROM drivers, "MMSDK" tools, etc., and the venerable (lol) Radio Shack VIS, which had a version if Encarta.
FWIR, most of the animations used Marcromind Director -- I remember working on the code that loaded these files to optimize it for CD-ROM loading, because the code would just seek all over the place rather than load into RAM and access from there.
This. If we get tools that enables simple creation of video/interactive assets then Wikipedia will get those more. As a life long graphics geek and programmer, currently the content creation ecosystem is not really on "bicycle" level - more like unicycle while juggling chainsaws - although it's getting better. I mean I've done graphics stuff all my life, and would be quite lost how to "do a quick animation" in something closer to 15 minutes than 15 hours or 15 days.
I think we have Adobe to thank for stagnation in creator tools. There are smaller, harder to find companies doing pieces of the work (i.e. Photopea for Photoshop) and lots of video editing apps that have grown up around Instagram and TikTok. Blender is great for 3d modeling and more.
They don't pay people to create content directly but in their most recent annual report they state that 32% of their expenses are supporting the community.
> The Wikimedia projects exist thanks to volunteer communities around the world that create and maintain them. We strengthen these communities through grants, programs, events, trainings, partnerships, tools to augment contributor capacity, and support for the legal defense of editors.
mneh... these expenses include things like the disastrous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo... and other similar projects which the existing community was not consulted on and have tenuous effects on actually attracting and retaining contributors.
Also, lot of Wikipedia articles are geared towards experts. Sometimes I'll go there looking to learn what something is and give up because understanding the article would require familiarity the parent domain.
On the other hand, the fact that I can often times pull up a comp-sci related wikipedia article and learn enough to implement that algorithm I need is really useful. I think in an ideal world, regular and simple Wikipedia would be more integrated, with some way to easily switch between them, and overall better editing for the simple version.
That's one reason I like that they've added the pop-up 'windows' into the internally-linked articles. They often lead to simpler material, or help define terms that otherwise go over my head. But yeah, many sci-tech articles are far from accessible to the 'intelligent layman'.
Wikipedia only accepts freely-licensed content (for example, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA; it must allow commercial use). People who are creating professional-quality video are not giving it away for free. Video takes a non-trivial amount of effort to script, record, create imagery for, and edit. That's on top of obtaining equipment like a camera, mic, computer for editing, etc. Sure everyone has a smartphone these days, but I think you were implying more than shaky badly-framed vertical video. If you'd like to see more videos on Wikipedia, the best place to start is by contributing yourself. I've done the same for photographs of local things in my area.
I also remember the CD-ROM era (and before that). It was also the time when software just worked. There was no other way.
The content on those CDs was permanent. Software rarely needed an updated, it didn't called home with telemetry and it didn't needed a constant internet connection to work. There wasn't subscription models for most of the software.
So you want to do some 3D renderings? Just install this CD with 3DStudio. It works.
I don't remember this at all! I remember monkeying around with config.sys and autoexec.bat setting env variables and loading drivers all so I could play some game I downloaded from a BBS. You had to constantly switch back from Windows to DOS depending on what application you were using. for ease of use.
By contrast, in today's world you can go on an app store (windows, steam, etc) press "download" and your application downloads, installs and for the most part, just works.
I would expect that for most people the time period where there was overlap between config.sys tinkering, Windows, and BBS was pretty small. And likely even less overlap with the era where "3D Studio was on a CDROM".
And to be honest I have always found these stories of "ohmygod I need one extra K of unfragmented low memory, time to tinker with config.sys again" way overblown. I would just do this selective boot thingie that was introduced with some DOS version and period. By the time memmaker was introduced, I don't remember ever needing to use it at all.
I spent a lot of time tinkering with config.sys and autoexec.bat. Partly because I wanted to get different games running and partly because it was almost like a game unto itself.
I don't remember this time. I remember a time when we blamed the operating system constantly for what was just as often an application memory management failure and thought that rebooting 4 times a day was normal.
I remember what you do. Windows pop ups every hour, multiple reboots, blue screens out of no where, hardware issues, and having to upgrade via CDs. Oh shit I scratched my windows update disk!
I was developing multimedia CD content with software like Director and Authorware[1]. We had a project and when it was released the project was clearly done. Today projects don't finish because continuous integration is a never ending story.
[1] I also miss this kinds of visual programming sometimes. Authorware was very underrated imho.
I'm not familiar with Authorware specifically, but there's a whole lost world where computing was extremely rich in visuality, dynamism, and play, and the striking thing is that these qualities were expected to enhance peoples' useful output. Some of the early Smalltalk demos exhibit this beautifully, and they're from the 70s. It almost feels like the era of "rich media" embodied by Encarta, "animated storybooks", etc., was the dying gasp of that conceptualization.
The common association with computers as mechanisms of boredom, exclusion, and wage slavery is so strong now that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously countenancing the old paradigm that the technology was meant to allow. I don't know whether that outcome was ultimately inevitable or not, but either way, it's massively disappointing.
I too mourn the loss of the "interactive web" for want of a better phrase. Computer programs like Encarta used to be fun to explore and interact with. The same can be said of many '90s and '00s sites that would feature Easter eggs, or a unique method of navigation.
Bring any of this up today, and you'll immediately be met with a barrage of critiques about Flash security, or UX dogma like "Users prefer to scroll, not click around or hover on stuff."
The end result is the soulless, identikit web we have today, where the only things that display motion are the banner ads. We navigate through websites by scrolling alone, as though we were using a microfiche machine to read a newspaper from 1920.
I think the biggest issue with the "interactive web" is that we found that interactivity isn't necessarily always a good thing. Sometimes, the simpler, boring, perhaps "soulless" technology is the most appropriate technology for the task.
Remember Microsoft Bob? Or 3D filebrowsers for Unix? Turns out, those weren't improvements over the more traditional filesystem browsers that persist to this day. More recently, the tile concept that MS tried in Windows 8 didn't catch on either.
When I took a course on information visualization, one of the takeaways was that, even as we're learning about several different techniques for displaying data, sometimes (more often than you'd think!) the most effective technique is a simple table. A well-formatted table, to be sure, but a table can be more powerful than even an interactive graph.
More to the point: I'm talking to you with pure text, even less interactive content than a microfiche machine reading a newspaper. But what interactivity would enhance my content or clarify my point instead of providing a distraction?
I'm not sure were it would be on a timeline compared to Encarta, but I'd add the hay days of Flash on the web to that. Much like you describe there was such a sense of fun in those days. Flash had enough abstraction and was simple enough for anyone to create weird animations and sites with interesting interactions.
The website feels like a stale medium today. I guess it's just too important to mess with nowadays. Pragmatism and familiarity rule supreme.
PS. I'm sure I'm biased because nostalgia. Flash web was a nightmare in many (most?) respects.
The Hypercard days were a particularly exciting time. Back then, it seemed like more and more of the computer could be "authored" by regular people. Then it all seemed to vanish.
> I also remember the CD-ROM era (and before that). It was also the time when software just worked.
Except when it didn't. Keeping with the Encyclopedia theme, it was usual back then to buy an yearly book to update your paper encyclopedia; once we stopped buying these (the last one we have is from 2009), the vendor convinced us to buy a "Grande Barsa DVD" (version 6.0). It doesn't work at all unless you first download and install a small patch, which was easy to find back then but now seems to have disappeared from the web.
I don't remember that time. I remember a bunch of software that had severe errors (Office 97 parsing some emails corrupting the PST, Exchange 5.0 lacking relay control) that were only resolved by paying for a major new release. And games like 'Magic Carpet' that had game breaking bugs meaning you could never finish them, masked by making the game so difficult you would never visit the level in question.
Is not that it was easy, or that programs weren't buggy. As read in other comments: autoexec.bat settings, sound card problems, network drivers and a bunch of software that had severe errors. I remember those too!
Because of that I would also correct "It was also the time when software just worked" with "It was also the time when software needed to correctly work at launch".
It was the mindset. Software that worked (99%?) fine from the first installation. The "I'll fix it later" wasn't contemplated or allowed.
Like a Sega Megadrive cartridge, it had to work. It's ok if you want to write "I remember that X game that crashed when...", but you know what I mean.
All that without needing updates, nor phoning home to check which buttons I press most, or requiring me to pay for that extra feature that is already there, already installed, but it will work just for one year.
Now the mentality is close to half-baked-I-must-fix-it-later, pay-me-for-life releases.
You clearly never had to set up a sound card for a DOS game (oh the joys of autoexec.bat) or had to install your own networking drivers just to get TCP/IP support.
No it really wasn’t. DirectX, OpenGL and Glide were really the start of Windows games and they didn’t become the norm until around 98 (bare in mind I’m talking about release date, not purchase date). In fact even as late as then some games were still written in DOS using special Glide or GL drivers for DOS. The 95 era of Windows was very much DOS orientated when it came to gaming.
Citation: I was a gamer and games developer in that era.
For better or for worse, you can read about current events (or even from a year or so ago) on wikipedia. Which you couldn't do with your CD based encyclopedia.
I spent a whole lot of time in my collage reading random articles from the hardbound volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. That was the first exposure I had to high-quality information about the world on an incredible variety of topics. It was such a great feeling sitting in a beautiful library surrounded by books in silence isolated from the chaotic and noisy world outside.
I get that now all information we can possibly want is at out fingertips, but there is something to be said about properly curated information in a defined boundary, in both physical and metaphorical sense, that you can focus on without getting distracted by the next random video.
I've noticed that all Americans (and probably all English speaking countries) knows the animal Aardvark. Here in Denmark few do (where its called Jordsvin - Earthhog)- I speculate that the reason is, that English encyclopedias would mention it on the first page of the first volume and probably with a picture given its somewhat peculiar looks, and can't help to think that the Aardvark might be forgotten, now that few consumes encyclopedias the old way :-)
My rural primary school got a Pentium PC with Encarta in 1996. It was placed in the library. I remember Encarta was on like 5 CDs, which the librarian kept under lock and key. You had to put your name down to book a 30 minute slot to use the PC, and take out the Encarta CDs on loan. It was a mission, and the whole time the librarian, a stern-faced woman in her mid 40s, would be standing behind you, arms folded, watching you warily lest you misused or damaged the sacred Encarta CDs. Fun times.
Encarta might have been one of my first experiences doinking around with computers - I remember replacing the .WAV file for a cheetah with the sound of a car's engine and trying (but failing) to convince my brother it was the REAL sound of a cheetah. There is something about the data being bounded and explorable, both through the software and the file system that was... neat.
> 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?
This is a great idea. If anyone at Microsoft reads this and agrees, please get whoever needs to know to know!
I remember we had something like "Encarta 98" (was that a thing?) on my dads computer. It was a family computer and my brother and me were sitting in front of it, watching videos and reading all the stuff in there and whatnot. I always dreamed that school was like this. Hasn't happened until today, which is sad.
My Dad was too cheap for Encarta. We had a shareware version called something like Infopedia. I remember doing a homework project at a friend's house and being quite jealous of the proper version!
I think I had Encarta 97 or 98 and reading all the pages of the stuff I liked, even printing them. At some point I memorized most of the texts of those pages.
I spent a lot of time playing the maze game that came with Encarta, and like the author when I think of the "I Have a Dream" speech, I usually think about the version I watched on Encarta (as well as JFKs speech about going to the moon).
Just this morning at breakfast, my daughter said to me "Did you know about goliath birdeating spiders?" I told her that I did not, but I looked it up on wikipedia. I started telling them how wikipedia is a digital version of encyclopedias, which many of us used to have in our home, came in ~20 book sets and had articles about almost everything you could want to know about. My younger daughter's response to the idea of having a 20 book set about all sorts of different topics was "Why would you do that?" Not only are things like Encarta and Encyclopedias foreign to kids growing up, the logic on why one would need something like that is lost on them. It's not necessarily a bad thing (wikipedia is awesome in its own right), but it is interesting.
Yeah you had the whole world at your fingertips but it still felt achievable to consume all of it. Nowadays you have the whole world at your fingertips but you dont know where to even start.
Being able to consume it offline certainly helped, I had Encarta 98 and dial-up, so I had the choice between going online and paying per minute, or just spend my free time reading an encyclopedia.
Ha when I was even younger my parents actually got me a Disney-themed encyclopedia ( https://www.gumtree.com/p/books/walt-disney-encyclopedia-boo... ) and I'd actually spend time sitting somewhere reading them. A kid version of me nowadays would probably be watching YouTube, sadly.
We had the book as children. It was a massive (to my child's hands) hard cover book. I spent ages paging through it, looking at all the cute little illustrations. Whenever I had a question that my father coulnd't answer, we'd rush over to the bookshelf to find it there. It always seemed to have the answer.
I miss paper encyclopedias. A roommate had the complete 1974 Winkler Prins, and I loved to just browse through it. Admittedly, browsing through Wikipedia is also fun, but still, browsing through a paper book is a very different experience. My kids don't see the point, unfortunately.
Ahhhh the memories. I remember that my dad had a Windows XP PC in his office and sometimes we kids were allowed to play with it.
There was this one funny feature in Encarta, that when you typed something about the moon, it would bring up a 3D simulation of the moon orbiting earth.
Annnd, you could influence the moon's orbit with the mouse so that it ended up crashing into earth.
Man Encarta brings back memories. My parents got me the CD box set, putting into the drive, the anticipation and awe when it loaded and hours spent going through the quality content. Take it for granted how far along we have come.
I think an Encarta 95 video about a laser shooting back and forth between two mirrors on a spaceship is still my mental model for how to think about time dilation. Wikipedia's wonderful, but the quality of the best multimedia content in Encarta was sky high in a way that's hard to reproduce without a team of paid artists and educators.
Ah the joys of hearing the CD stacker in the classroom spin away as it tried to serve a room of 30 kids content from a bunch of Encarta CDs shared over the network drives.
Encarta was fun. Also I remember having some "specialized" encyclopedias on the CDs - about cats, about Formula-1 etc. It was very interesting to just look around random articles, like Scott says.
On the slightly related note - I've found recently that Wikipedia has several lists called Vital articles which compile the best and most essential articles. It feels a bit like those old encyclopedias. So I've decided to read through level 3 articles for fun, as a personal project.
I downloaded a 3gb file today that contains information about the human genome. But it was just an accessory file that lists a bunch of variations within the genome - not even the genome itself! Amazing to think how many books would fit into those same 3gb and yet we casually use it up with routine science now.
"Multimedia" doesn't really exist anymore in the polished way it used to. If you want to learn about, say, Lewis and Clark, you could look it up on Wikipedia where you can find some pictures and a few source links where you can track down more info. Or you could watch a video about it on YouTube. Twenty years ago you could buy a single CD that would interweave video, audio, text, pictures, and interactive elements into a cohesive whole that felt much more alive. Is today's free information better than yesterday's expensive information? Probably, but I'd still point to Microsoft Dinosaurs if I wanted to light a fire in the heart of a child.
I miss books. The kind of "Encyclopedia of" style that had pictures, text, diagrams, and maps that were all part of a whole. Written for a general audience of curious people and not needing to cater to such a wide audience as Wikipedia.
As someone who was fortunate to have a World Book encyclopaedia set, I think having a curated, "this is everything" experience is vastly under-rated.
Encarta was better because it had some multi-media (as opposed to "just paper").
I remember being thrilled with Wikipedia when it came out, going down lots of rabbit holes, and marveling at all the up-to-date information, but a decade-and-half later, its downsides are also apparent to me:
- easily leads to distraction
- subject to its own kind of bias
- harder to get "big picture" without some a priori mental framework
I am quietly happy that World Book is still around :-)
> I remember being thrilled with Wikipedia when it came out, going down lots of rabbit holes,
That has not changed even a tiny a bit. Everytime I start with a topic, I end up (like everyone that is a bit curious) completely elsewhere
https://xkcd.com/214/ (there was another one I cannot find where someone was having an accident, the other person ran for information about how to close the wound and came back after an hour with information about (I think) Roman antiquity)
The very first time I saw a CDROM was an encyclopedia, 1992 or so?
I believe it was Grolier's or Compton's. It ran on an IBM PS/2 style system with an external CDROM that used drive caddies.
It took at least a minute to search for an article and then probably another minute to load the information up. I remember there being some black and white pictures with some articles as well, and there was even a laser printer to print your findings.
I remember parents saying it cost "$10,000", but I also remember that we got it using Campbell's soup labels and box tops that students turned in.
My family finally got a Windows PC in 1996, and Encarta was one of the first pieces of software we installed. I can't claim that I miss it much, but at the time it was definitely magical.
I was awestruck by Microsoft Encarta when I got a copy back in around 1994 (I was 11 years old). I spent so long just browsing through the articles and listening to audio clips.
I love Encarta. Growing up with limited access to internet, Encarta was the world of information for me. It used to be so fun going through random articles, finding some multimedia which explained stuff with animations like for Chernobyl accident, felt so amazing at that time. The quality of content was amazing.
Also, the games added such a new dimension to an encyclopedia where you wanted to learn more.
Encarta is definitely the best MS software product I have used, apart from maybe some games.
I think of all the school kids in the Internet era that have been told, "You cannot use Wikipedia" as a research source. Did teachers ever say that about Encarta?
I remember going through some 3D model of the colloseum in it, always thinking it’s maybe actually a game but it was just a static 3D model. Must have spent hours there.
I loved Encarta, was so much more interactive and great for children to learn from, without getting mixed up with Wikipedia's problems with political and biased edits and such. I really wish they brought this back.
Before Internet and Wikipedia was a thing (at least in Argentina), there was Encarta. It helped me through many of my school projects :)
I have fond memories of it. Great piece of software. I don't think it's needed in the modern world though, but who knows. Maybe in countries where internet is still not accessible.
I never had Encarta, but I grew up with a digital version of World Book Encyclopedia, bundled with my family's ancient iMac G4, and it gave me similar feelings to what this article describes.
I owe a lot to Encarta and Microsoft Mathematics. I love that application I think it was one of the first applications that I bought with my hard earned money instead of pirating. because it was so worth it.
Plus, you could cite your reference with style, i.e.: "I got this information straight outta Compton... you are about to witness the strength of street knowledge".
Convenience replaces nostalgia: Why miss Encarta when you have Wikipedia? I liked the Encarta experience: it was amazing to see videos, photos and everything in a nice UI back then, but today we have Wikipedia, Wikimedia, etc. It's a way superior experience and there's x100 content.
Encarta was charged with multimedia. It was a really new and exciting experience for a kid growing up before Flash sites started really even became popular. Loading up Encarta, you'd get a musical intro with flashes of footage from shuttle launches, famous speeches, native American tribes, animals, etc. Then immediate after, you get a button called "Explore". Clicking that zooms you into a web of categories, with each one zooming further and further down into more fine-grained topics where you could get previews about what you were about to discover.
The articles were concise and full of video or other interactive pieces. Certain topics would have a brief sound recording as an introduction. I even remember you could assemble a dinosaur to learn about the different parts.
Every prominent UI interaction, from a button click to expanding a context menu, had a unique and satisfying sound. That would be a huge problem for most people with most UI today, but given that there was so much media being played, it fit in naturally.
The interface itself was basically a web browser, so it helped to teach kids about simple concepts, like navigation, hyperlinks, bookmarks, internal vs external resources, and so on. It was a great pre-introduction to surfing the web.
For a kid, I think Encarta would be a much more fun and engaging experience than Wikipedia when choosing an encyclopedia. If you want to see what Bill Gates envisioned for multimedia learning around the time, you should check out the (hilariously cheesy) videos that came with his book "The Road Ahead"
And don't even get me started on how cool the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was at the time.
(Am I really getting nostalgic over encyclopedias over here? ...)
A one stop shop is kinda nice. The quality of the content is really good too. Wikipedia is probably good enough for the most part though.
I remember being so excited and enchanted by encarta and even non digital encyclopedias and books as a kid. The idea that I could crack open a volume and learn anything felt magical, in a non digitized world.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20739629 (1198 points/410 comments)