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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#221

Post by cabaalis »

pkaye wrote: post #152
nickthegreek wrote: post #90

Earlier 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…

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.

In elementary school they taught us to use an index book. I wonder if this skill is taught today. (doubtful.)

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#222

Post by dredmorbius »

pastage wrote: post #87
asdfman123 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a kid growing up, Encarta was far superior to anything Wikipedia offers today. Sure, Wikipedia wins in sheer volume but that's it. Encarta was a well curated collection of knowledge that was consistent and perfectly suited for its audience. More is not always better.

When it comes to knowledge and data more is by definition always better.

... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658

-- Jorge Luis Borges

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#223

Post by kragen »

echelon wrote: post #133
nickthegreek wrote: post #90

Earlier 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…

I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that people socialize more in the subway than they used to, now that they can send WhatsApp audio messages to their friends instead of reading a novel. But the grocery store half a block away still sells food in much the same way they did in 1994. Bigots still yell at me on the street to go back to my own country. Most of the workforce is still employed rather than gigging, financially independent, consulting, or riding the purple wage. International money transfers still take a significant percentage, unless you use Bitcoin, which most people still don't accept. Elections are still being won by polarizing populists who promise paradise and then pick your pockets; here in Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner even kept the records of her illegal wiretaps in paper form in the secret vault under her house, facilitating access to them against her will by the police. (And that didn't stop her from getting re-elected last week; her opponent also has a history of illegal wiretaps.)

You'd think that universal access to all human knowledge would have remade society, but actually most of the humans don't really seem to care about knowledge. We got the Arab Spring, which turned into Daesh, the Syrian Civil War, and a new military dictatorship in Egypt. (And we got anti-vaxxers, global warming denialists, and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams.") Wikileaks didn't really move the needle on Obama's re-election. If cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing is rewiring the power structures of society, that's more because of Russian trolls and Twitter bots than anything else.

Probably the changes you're talking about will come. But I'm not convinced that it's a revolution that cute girls on the bus give me their Instagram instead of their phone number.

(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741592 for my thoughts on other, more positive possibilities of modern informatics.)

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#224

Post by dredmorbius »

daveslash wrote: post #55
NikolaNovak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, this is just incorrect by somebody who either hadn't fully used Encarta / Compton's, or doesn't remember them. I have been looking for 5+ years for a tablet or PC "Atlas" which can easily, with a click of button, show me graphs, or colour regions, based on specified criteria such as political types; economy; climate; productivity; and other interesting stats. Wikipedia articles are horribly inconsistent ab…

A huge portion of Wikipedia data is from the CIA's World Fact Book, which is public information. I wonder if combining that with a 3D rendering of the globe could be a viable product...

Citation requested.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#225

Post by cabaalis »

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

Did anyone else play with the gravity simulations to try to send the moon flying around like crazy?

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#226

Post by kragen »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #219
kragen wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How close was Encarta to that? I never used it.

It had some simple interactive elements. Boring from today's perspective. Exciting back then. https://www.oldpcgaming.net/wp-content/gallery/encarta-97/Sn...

Can you describe the ones you most remember? I see the image but I'm more interested in your (memory of your) subjective experience. What level of creative freedom did you have in the interactivity?

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#227

Post by hk__2 »

pushpop wrote: post #163
hk__2 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

I do have used Encarta, and I really enjoyed it. I felt like you were talking about pure content quality, when it was (as I understand) rather about the way that (good) content is presented. If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience? Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#229

Post by SanchoPanda »

mey wrote: post #44
NikolaNovak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, this is just incorrect by somebody who either hadn't fully used Encarta / Compton's, or doesn't remember them. I have been looking for 5+ years for a tablet or PC "Atlas" which can easily, with a click of button, show me graphs, or colour regions, based on specified criteria such as political types; economy; climate; productivity; and other interesting stats. Wikipedia articles are horribly inconsistent ab…

You can download the CIA World Factbook, but it isn't an app, nor does search work offline. It is basically a scrape of the site. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/

Interestingly,

2017 version: 170 mb

2018 version: 1.6gb

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#230

Post by m1sta_ »

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…

Is Encarta open source? Microsoft might be open to allowing it to be integrated into Wikipedia.
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