Oh! I have very fond memories of Encarta. I basically stopped playing video games because of it.
I Miss Microsoft Encarta
161–170 of 419 posts
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 cost…
In Encarta’s case, cheap, high density storage mediums were passed by something that already existed and had existed for quite some time before, the internet. In other regards maybe the storage medium was just a side detail and the important part was what could be done with that data thanks to faster computers.
There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future already being here but not being evenly distributed seems appropriate.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Again you’re only discussing things at a textual level. Encarta wasn’t like other encyclopaedias - Encarta was a fully interactive multimedia experience.
The issue yourself and others who haven’t used Encarta is that you’re thinking about it as purely a text document store, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Encarta is more like a museum than it is like Wikipedia. It has a smaller curated set of write ups but has all the interactive exhibits, games, and multimedia content that a good museum has. Wikipedia is about breadth of content where as Encarta was about engagement.
This is something you’d expect the web to excel at but unfortunately the race to breadth of content has resulted in a less interesting delivery of said content.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#164Is any of the Encarta content available in public domain or other?
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#165Here 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)
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#166> 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 vi…
> 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.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I had a World Book and then an Encyclopedia Britannica growing up. They gave me many many hours of pleasure. (I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.) And, yes, I seem to recall the price was something in the $500-$1000 ballpark. Which was definitely a lot of money in the early 70s(?) when I got it--and, yes, the salesman came to…
> I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.
Same here! The knowledge was obsolete but the memories of my childhood were a part of it. I eventually recycled most of them after I last moved but there are a few books I still have somewhere.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#168I 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.
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. :)
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 parti…
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.
That's the point, though. Having it curated and written by experts puts them in control of what direction you go. Realistically, I could click through the radiation article on wikipedia, and may be exposed to what I need to know, but I also could just wander down a rabbit hole of useless information.
That's the entire point. I'm not the expert. Nor am I able to even understand the basics of which direction to read/learn - that's what the expert curators are for.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#170Encarta 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…
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.