I Miss Microsoft Encarta • Hacker News Board

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#141

Post by johannes1234321 » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:08 PM UTC

cpach wrote: post #105

sureste wrote: post #56

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 i…

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 pers…

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#142

Post by lttlrck » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #49

abhinavsharma wrote: post #22

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…

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…

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#143

Post by whereistimbo » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:11 PM UTC

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...

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#144

Post by mongol » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:11 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #115

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…

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

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#145

Post by nnq » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

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 :(

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#146

Post by dtech » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#147

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

groundlogic wrote: post #2

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 somet…

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#148

Post by aksss » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

cpach wrote: post #105

sureste wrote: post #56

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 i…

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 pers…

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#149

Post by grawprog » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC

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.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#150

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 7:18 PM UTC

floren wrote: post #100

ChuckMcM wrote: post #15

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 do…

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

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.