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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#191

Post by kragen »

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…

You should check out my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 for a summary of the current state of some of the existing projects that do some of this, but also check out the Wikipedia Vital Articles lists. Typical "vital" articles are large, about 100K, so in 400MB you could manage about 4000 articles, which is most of the ones in the fourth-level Vital Articles list.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#192

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#193

Post by GordonS »

dtech wrote: post #146
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.

TBH, didn't realise it was still a thing in the early 00's!

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#194

Post by leoxvi »

I am having fun developing an alternative interface for Wikipedia called "Explore":

https://wikischool.org/explore

https://wikischool.org/explore/Ludwig%20Wittgenstein?l=en&t=... (read an article chronologically)

The larger goal is to make self-study more effective and enjoyable. Desktop browser recommended for now, as the mobile UX needs improvement.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#195

Post by GordonS »

gnulinux wrote: post #160
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…

22 here and I remember Encarta very fondly. I did not use it very often as back then paperback encyclopedias were still a "thing" and Wikipedia was pretty ok too; but I definitely reading about random physicists in Encarta. It was fun!

Huh, I'm almost 40, really didn't realise Encarta had still a thing for people who are now in their early 20's!

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#196

Post by chrisco255 »

kragen wrote: post #171

Writing this from an occasionally-connected hand computer in the “developing world”, don't use Encarta. Use Kiwix. I have a 45000-article slice of the English Wikipedia here in 6 GB, with nearly all the pictures, and even animations and some video and audio, such as the radio broadcast of the Hindenburg crash. To give you an idea of its breadth, articles I've consulted recently include "anal sex", "rectum", "convolut…

Don't pretend like Wikipedia doesn't depend on donations from primarily capitalist economy citizens. Just because an organization is non-profit does not mean it's anti-capitalist, or commons-based. It is still a private organization run by private individuals. They just don't distribute profits to shareholders and their business model is donation-based, just as churches have been for centuries.

I agree that there's a lot of promise for open source resources like Linux, Wikipedia, and Bitcoin, but I see that there's also a great trade-off between Cathedral vs. Bazaar style production.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#197

Post by situational87 »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #109
situational87 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember using one of the earliest Encarta versions and seeing a tiny postage stamp sized video animate and play some half broken wav file for the first time. I remember it hitting me like a baseball bat: we can do VIDEOS on computers now! This will change everything! TV is going to die because there are no ads on computers!

Those were more innocent times, to be fair.

I spent a good five years online browsing the web before they decided to start adding advertising to everything. I never agreed to that switch in the contract.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#198

Post by ChuckMcM »

floren wrote: post #173
ChuckMcM wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Sin…

Ah, I should have guessed it would be a destructive process. Still something I'll keep in mind but I have a particular weakness about destroying old books, even if intellectually I understand 1) it's not a valuable book and 2) there are other copies out there and 3) it's worth more to me in PDF form.

I completely understand that sentiment! I definitely have books that I keep because they are valuable to me both as a book and as the information they contain.

Textbooks, are by their nature, more 'conduits of information' than works of art. (TAOCP not withstanding). Also they get regularly re-issued in order to be resold to students so their knowledge is more widely dispersed than many books.

When I was at Google I visited the book scanning operation a couple of times and they had these machines that would photograph a page, dewarp, and some of them even turn the page (some required a person to turn the pages). While I would love to have such a capability, the only way I could justify it would be to have texts I needed to add to my data set that were not mine to destroy.

My work-around for this issue so far has been to find and buy a second copy of a book on the used market to digitize, best of both worlds for me in that situation.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#199

Post by mxfh »

vanderZwan wrote: post #77
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…

Are you kidding me? The only way hearing the opening screen again[0] could evoke more warm fuzzy nostalgia with me is if at the end it would crossfade into Baba Yetu from Civ IV's main menu screen[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e0Qelqp-Cc

Though Encarta evokes a bit more of Civ VI Sogno di Volare to me, but I share the sentiment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQYN2P3E06s

Besides Encarta, the mid 90s where also the time where I was first able to buy satellite imagery on CR-ROM for all of Germany from my collected lunch money and years before Microsoft's TerraServer changed the world, which itself was long before Google Maps took over.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8q89q4/microsofts-terrase...

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#200

Post by wazoox »

Balgair wrote: post #176

Mom cried. She used to be a librarian. Then she was a geographer. The old school kind, the one that actually drew actual maps. The librarian skills really came in handy when drawing real maps. Everything had to be right. People could get lost in the wilderness and be using your map, or countries could be drawing international borders based on your map, war could break out over your mistakes. The printers and early do…

In 1993 I participated a contest with my girlfriend. We needed to find lots of factoids in literature, for instance we had a phrase from some obscure book and needed to find what book it belonged too; then a longer block of text from Proust, but which book? In fact the passage (about Venice, its tiled roofs) is present at two places in "la Recherche", but with a couple of words changed. Another thing to find was the mystery component of a mint julep as per Mark Twain.

We spent something like two weeks at the library, thumbing through hundreds of books (all of Mark Twain, all of Borges, all of Proust, and some others). All of this would be a 20 minutes search nowadays.

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