131–140 of 419 posts
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.
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…
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?
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.
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…
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.
It competed against very expensive and bulky sets of books, so the update speed was more than acceptable.
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…
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.
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 p…
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 everywhe…