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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#111

Post by dawnerd »

nickthegreek wrote: post #90
shortformblog wrote: post #37

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…

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 h…

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

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#112

Post by oneplane »

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#114

Post by hk__2 »

pushpop wrote: post #81
liability wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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!)

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…

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

Source? Research papers on this subject don’t find a great difference in quality between Wikipedia and other encyclopedias.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#115

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#116

Post by paulddraper »

oneplane wrote: post #112

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 sc…

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#117

Post by tasogare »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #25
GordonS wrote: post #3

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 thi…

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 + Wikipe…

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#119

Post by WorldMaker »

hugh4life wrote: post #38

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.

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).

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