> 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 l…
Those jet animations are really good.
I've found some math animations on wikipedia, some of which are good and some of which are totally pointless:
Cashless and bankless society. I moved to London last year and have used cash roughly zero times since. Visiting my parents (outside London) is like jumping in to treacle. Finding coins for the bus? Paper tickets on the train? Give me a god damn break. Even using chip and pin is weird now since almost all my purchases, except for dining out, are either touchless, online, or via mobile app. In 20 years i think cash (b…
> Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade. Don't have a safety deposit box with precious metals and jewels inside? Many, many people do - among other items (guns, cash, drugs, etc). While "brick and mortar" banks may not exist, something of the same nature will - some kind of high-security place to store stuff like that, away from home. Maybe it will also be com…
While I appreciate the recommendations, the language/tone is a bit over the top. Nobody’s seriously suggesting you should dump offline slices of Google Maps, or Open Street Map (OsmAnd) in order to use an outdated virtual atlas. It’s more like we’re reminiscing on how National Geographic (and others) used to actually publish these very large world atlases, and how for it’s time, CD-ROM-delivered encyclopedias for the…
Thank you! Censored. The original article does indeed suggest that people like me are using Encarta today rather than the things I suggested. I assume Scott is correct about that, and I wanted to offer them some better alternatives than the profoundly shitty proprietary experience offered by Encarta. I mean, what does Encarta have to say about principal component analysis or anal sex?
Right. Besides those topics (though maybe it would have them?), Encarta also doesn’t have any facts of science or history beyond 2009 outside of whatever web updates might have shipped, and yet I’d also point out that Wikipedia is not considered a primary source, and writers of Wikipedia might have biases of their own. Third-party sources written by editors, like Encarta and Britannica would historically claim to be more trustworthy than Wikipedia, and this was countered by Wikipedia saying they had more breadth and faster updates from the community, with a wider set of viewpoints due to crowd input. Ultimately, Encarta folded because they couldn’t compete with free online offerings. I’d only suggest that... for health matters, or business ones, or well, any research at all: you should follow links to primary sources and evaluate them; you should do research with the rest of Google and private databases. Wikipedia is for summaries and the rest of the internet provides the source material. Encarta provided their own set of curated summaries with multimedia, something Wikipedia as a series of textual articles has not historically engaged in. So, there are definitely advantages to Wikipedia, but it doesn’t entirely negate advantages of Encarta or having the rest of the web at your fingertips. I sincerely hope unlimited high speed internet reaches everyone ASAP, including via space satellites, if cheap enough to use...
Yah. People will just die. Refugee sort of implies a refuge. There’s not going to be such thing’s around if things go south as we fear they are likely to. It’s gonna play out far more like the Old Testament.
> There’s not going to be such thing’s around Heretofor uninhabitable places such as ... greenland maybe?
Thank you! Censored. The original article does indeed suggest that people like me are using Encarta today rather than the things I suggested. I assume Scott is correct about that, and I wanted to offer them some better alternatives than the profoundly shitty proprietary experience offered by Encarta. I mean, what does Encarta have to say about principal component analysis or anal sex?
Right. Besides those topics (though maybe it would have them?), Encarta also doesn’t have any facts of science or history beyond 2009 outside of whatever web updates might have shipped, and yet I’d also point out that Wikipedia is not considered a primary source, and writers of Wikipedia might have biases of their own. Third-party sources written by editors, like Encarta and Britannica would historically claim to be…
While searching for a list of topics in Encarta, I found a PC Mag article recommending Encarta over other encyclopedias of the day - it really took me back, I’d forgotten how I used to get all my software recommendations from magazines - https://books.google.ca/books?id=6qzzglITYTYC&pg=PA158&lpg=P...
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?
The most vivid memory I have of myself spending hours on Encarta as a child was with their "flight simulator" / bird's eye view. I will try to find a video of it but I am sure it will be disappointing in today's standards as well.
The MindMaze[1] music takes me back. I spent three-digits hours on that game as a little kid. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT-VbFcck6A
It shouldn't be that hard to build MindMaze on top of Wikipedia. I wonder if anyone's done it? Although I do remember the hard geography questions very frequently just being "What is the county seat of (insert random US county)?"
It's funny to think of it but CD-ROMs ... really were where all the multimedia was. Outside professionals, not many people stored videos or audio on their PC in the early day, so all the multimedia type stuff, and to some extent including video games ... was all centered around the CD-ROM. I used to gobble up all the super cheap "multimedia collection" type disks available at the time. To some extent what made comput…
There were earlier systems in the 1980s that combined PCs (or equivalent machines) with Pioneer LaserDisc systems (which could be controlled via a serial port) - a somewhat well known one was the BBC Domesday Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project An early glimpse of the future, somewhat.
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…
> In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC Interesting, as the 486 came out in late '89. Seems you'd like a little more oomph, but perhaps they were too expensive at the time.
One product design goal was to run on the mass market 386 PCs of the time.
It wasn't so much about oomph as it was about buggy device drivers that would inevitably blue screen at some point, or flaky CD-ROM drives that just never seemed to read the same data twice the same way.
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!
Well, we're talking about mid to late 2000s (~15 years ago). Remember that Encarta was supported until 2009. And I grew up in a developing country so everything was happening with a few years lag.