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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#231

Post by isostatic »

aksss wrote: post #140
rchaud wrote: post #29

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…

Pretty sure the hours-long rabbit hole thing didn’t start with Encarta :D But you still would have been considered a geek of the highest order doing it with Encarta. Wiki first popularized the experience.

The deepest rabbit hole I tend to find is tvtropes.

Start at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHol... and before I know it time has gone.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#232

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

... and even in 1995, this was a 50-year-old dream, finally realised:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#233

Post by bearbin »

leoxvi wrote: post #194

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.

I had a short browse and I was really impressed by how much nicer to read you have managed to make wikipedia. Normally I much prefer static HTML to whatever mess the latest javascript framework manages to conjure up but what you've done really seems to work.

The text actually fills the screen rather than just hiding in the gutter on the left, and even though you've removed most styling cues around links and actions, it's done in a way that it's still obvious what everything does, so the main content can be clearer.

The dynamic sidebar table of contents is also particularly effective - on desktop, everybody has a widescreen monitor now and it's disappointing now few sites take advantage of it.

My only two critical points are your choice of typeface, which is awful and significantly degrades the experience (browsing with fonts turned off is a great improvement), and the speed - not only does clicking a link take several seconds to do something but there isn't really any indication whether things are happening or not.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#234

Post by mohn »

leoxvi wrote: post #194

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.

Nice! I like this idea and look forward to seeing it develop further.

A bug to report: inspired by comments elsewhere in this thread, I searched for "radiation", and your interface is rendering the bulleted list about different kinds of radiation above the actual first paragraph (which ends with "This includes:" to introduce the list).

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#235

Post by akgoel »

joblessjunkie wrote: post #205

Encarta was part of my first job out of university. I worked in Microsoft's Multimedia Division, tasked with creating the first video and audio drivers for Windows. IIRC the BMP, WAV, and AVI file formats all came from this team at about this time. In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC with an early CD-ROM drive to demo an early build of Encarta at a trade show. It was a lot of effort to find a…

This basically sounds like WinHelp, which was a compiled format of RTF, prior to the availability of HTML.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#236

Post by davidgerard »

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…

> It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate.

We actually asked them about this, IIRC - it turns out a lot of that stuff was licensed from third parties, and they weren't free to release it under a free content license, and didn't have the resources to sort out what was what.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#237

Post by leoxvi »

bearbin wrote: post #233
leoxvi wrote: post #194

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.

I had a short browse and I was really impressed by how much nicer to read you have managed to make wikipedia. Normally I much prefer static HTML to whatever mess the latest javascript framework manages to conjure up but what you've done really seems to work. The text actually fills the screen rather than just hiding in the gutter on the left, and even though you've removed most styling cues around links and actions,…

Thanks for the feedback. There will be a "font-switch" option and I may need to do some user testing for the best default font.

The speed issue is really a Wikipedia (and Archive.org) API fetching issue plus some parsing time. I am planning to make the data fetching parallel, but need to do some data-source-code refactoring first. A better loading indication UI will also help.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#238

Post by Daishiman »

kragen wrote: post #212
sanbor wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much same experience but in Argentina. I got Encarta 97 or 98 for 5 pesos, 5 dollars at that time, when I was 11 years old. Later I read about a Visual Basic course in a newspaper so I figured out that the way to build software was using this Visual Basic software. So I went to the same place where I bought Encarta and got Visual Basic 5, which was my first programming language.

I'm guessing you were only able to access Encarta because copyright enforcement wasn't strong here in Argentina? (Or was US$5 the Microsoft official price?) What do you think about my comment on Kiwix and Wikipedia at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 ?

Software piracy wasn't on anyone's radar at the time.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#239

Post by alanh »

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…

My family was never one to spend a dollar if we could spend a nickel, so our encyclopedia was significantly out of date, as was our globe. But if you knew that the USSR didn’t really exist anymore, everything else was pretty much the same. Most knowledge doesn't become wrong; it just becomes history.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#240

Post by leoxvi »

mohn wrote: post #234
leoxvi wrote: post #194

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.

Nice! I like this idea and look forward to seeing it develop further. A bug to report: inspired by comments elsewhere in this thread, I searched for "radiation", and your interface is rendering the bulleted list about different kinds of radiation above the actual first paragraph (which ends with "This includes:" to introduce the list).

Yes, noted, thanks. Some wikipedia templates are difficult to get right. Will see how to fix this and make the presentation clearer.
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