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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

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Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#31

Post by oriesdan »

kar1181 wrote: post #30

That whole period of the PC industry where 'multimedia' became mainstream was pretty magical. I know the Amiga was well ahead of the PC ecosystem for a long time in capability but it never hit schools (at least where I grew up in South Australia) like PCs did. So with the emergence of VGA and Super VGA, widespread availability (and relative affordability) of 486 DX class PCs, Soundblasters and Optical Drives, the PC…

One thing I remember from those times : even knowing there was an encyclopedia on the school library computer, I would not use it, because it just sounded impractical. I would need to ask for permission to use the computer, then wait for it to start, then figure how to do a search, while the competitive proposition was just picking the encyclopedia volume for the correct letter and finding my page!

How much a few decades can change… I would call painful the idea of manually looking for a page in a book rather than doing a computer search, nowadays.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#33

Post by rakoo »

martin_a wrote: post #5

I remember we had something like "Encarta 98" (was that a thing?) on my dads computer. It was a family computer and my brother and me were sitting in front of it, watching videos and reading all the stuff in there and whatnot. I always dreamed that school was like this. Hasn't happened until today, which is sad.

I think I had Encarta 97 or 98 and reading all the pages of the stuff I liked, even printing them. At some point I memorized most of the texts of those pages.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#34

Post by bllguo »

kenty wrote: post #2

Encarta was an amazing product that I fondly remember using in school. It was essentially wikipedia before there was wikipedia with the upside that it had curated and citable sources and generally a much higher quality of writing. In my eyes, over the years, wikipedia has caught up a lot in terms of quality of writing and wikimedia now has a lot of images and video. I wonder if there is a way to just download the who…

there are many ways to download wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#35

Post by kar1181 »

oriesdan wrote: post #31
kar1181 wrote: post #30

That whole period of the PC industry where 'multimedia' became mainstream was pretty magical. I know the Amiga was well ahead of the PC ecosystem for a long time in capability but it never hit schools (at least where I grew up in South Australia) like PCs did. So with the emergence of VGA and Super VGA, widespread availability (and relative affordability) of 486 DX class PCs, Soundblasters and Optical Drives, the PC…

One thing I remember from those times : even knowing there was an encyclopedia on the school library computer, I would not use it, because it just sounded impractical. I would need to ask for permission to use the computer, then wait for it to start, then figure how to do a search, while the competitive proposition was just picking the encyclopedia volume for the correct letter and finding my page! How much a few dec…

We had a very permissive culture around the PC equipment, pretty much if a computer was free you could use it. There was no authentication or use policies. That did change towards the end of my schooling when networking and internet access was finally rolled out. Novell Netware ruined everything!

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#36

Post by timdaub »

Ahhhh the memories. I remember that my dad had a Windows XP PC in his office and sometimes we kids were allowed to play with it.

There was this one funny feature in Encarta, that when you typed something about the moon, it would bring up a 3D simulation of the moon orbiting earth.

Annnd, you could influence the moon's orbit with the mouse so that it ended up crashing into earth.

That was sooo fun!

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#37

Post by read_if_gay_ »

oriesdan wrote: post #28
JeanFred wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Kiwix: https://www.kiwix.org/ “Kiwix is an offline reader for online content like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access. The software as well as the content is free to use for anyone.”

Indeed, Kiwix is the proper solution for anyone who cares about knowledge access in places where internet connection is spotty. Given the file format it uses (zim) is compressed, and meant to be accessed compressed to pluck a specific article, you can have all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB. Plus, the specs of the file format are published and it's easy to build your own imp…

> all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB

36GB seems like a really big number if it's just text. A cursory Google search says 1MB will hold about 500 pages of text (ignoring compression). So 36GB would be something like 18 million pages? Let's say a 1000 page book is 10cm wide, so 18M pages wind up as 1800 meters of books, or 180 meter-wide bookshelves with 10 shelves each, which is maybe a large library? It seems like a lot of that must be external sources. I wonder what percentage was actually written by Wikipedia editors?

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#38

Post by speps »

sleavey wrote: post #29
speps wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Archive.org has it: https://archive.org/details/microsoftencartapremiumedition20...

Nice! Do you know if it requires a licence to actually install/run, or if it's completely free now?

Just tried it, works perfectly fine on Windows 10 (2004).

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#39

Post by indy »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #37
oriesdan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Kiwix is the proper solution for anyone who cares about knowledge access in places where internet connection is spotty. Given the file format it uses (zim) is compressed, and meant to be accessed compressed to pluck a specific article, you can have all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB. Plus, the specs of the file format are published and it's easy to build your own imp…

> all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB 36GB seems like a really big number if it's just text. A cursory Google search says 1MB will hold about 500 pages of text (ignoring compression). So 36GB would be something like 18 million pages? Let's say a 1000 page book is 10cm wide, so 18M pages wind up as 1800 meters of books, or 180 meter-wide bookshelves with 10 shelves each, which…

I'd assume that figure would also include the indexes required for searching

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#40

Post by oriesdan »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #37
oriesdan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Kiwix is the proper solution for anyone who cares about knowledge access in places where internet connection is spotty. Given the file format it uses (zim) is compressed, and meant to be accessed compressed to pluck a specific article, you can have all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB. Plus, the specs of the file format are published and it's easy to build your own imp…

> all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB 36GB seems like a really big number if it's just text. A cursory Google search says 1MB will hold about 500 pages of text (ignoring compression). So 36GB would be something like 18 million pages? Let's say a 1000 page book is 10cm wide, so 18M pages wind up as 1800 meters of books, or 180 meter-wide bookshelves with 10 shelves each, which…

Not sure what you mean with external sources, but I have seen nothing but user generated content in there (but I haven't read all wikipedia articles, obviously).

A few things to note, though:

1/ it's not pure text content, it's html content, this has a significant overhead

2/ a zim file is not just compressed content, but also huge indexes referencing where is which content. You look for your article's title in the reference table, you find the position of your article in the file and you decompress just that part. This is what allows for selective decompression without decompressing the whole content.

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