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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

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Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#71

Post by danielbarla »

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…

It's interesting, I split my childhood between Hungary and South Africa, and pretty much along the timeline of the 486. During the late 80s in Hungary, the Amiga certainly was a big thing, even in schools. I suspect it was due to the price; even an Amiga was considered super expensive, and if you ran into a PC it was either at your parents' work or similar, and it would have been a 286 or worse.

Although I suppose the 486 came out in '89, it was rare to see it in the schools that I went to, or in my friends' homes. Similarly with VGA and SVGA (and decent sound cards!), it took several years to become affordable and mainstream. But when they did, and when Pentiums started coming out, it was pretty much the death knell for the Amiga. I recall somberly looking at benchmarks of 486s, and comparing it to our pride and joy, a 68030-upgraded A1200, and realising that it was a losing game.

So you are absolutely right, though I think the timeline is probably a bit shifted depending on the country / economic conditions.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#72

Post by hanselot »

kar1181 wrote: post #35
oriesdan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I remember in second and third grade we had the same thing, except, we were running pentium 2 and 3 machines around 1998. Our school lab had about 20-25 pc's, and all of them ran windows xp.

We filled every conceivable space on those machines with pirated copies of gameboy emulators and various pokemon roms. It became a game of, will the computer admins ever realise, and if they do, will they do anything about it.

Long story short, they gave up trying to police it after about a year, when no matter what they tried, we always found another way to get the games back, in the process of course we learned quite a bit about computing (happy accident? Who cares, my love of computers started in that stupid class)

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#73

Post by hahamrfunnyguy »

scoutt wrote: post #60

I also remember the CD-ROM era (and before that). It was also the time when software just worked. There was no other way. The content on those CDs was permanent. Software rarely needed an updated, it didn't called home with telemetry and it didn't needed a constant internet connection to work. There wasn't subscription models for most of the software. So you want to do some 3D renderings? Just install this CD with 3D…

> It was also the time when software just worked.

I don't remember this at all! I remember monkeying around with config.sys and autoexec.bat setting env variables and loading drivers all so I could play some game I downloaded from a BBS. You had to constantly switch back from Windows to DOS depending on what application you were using. for ease of use.

By contrast, in today's world you can go on an app store (windows, steam, etc) press "download" and your application downloads, installs and for the most part, just works.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#74

Post by jalk »

noisy_boy wrote: post #42

I spent a whole lot of time in my collage reading random articles from the hardbound volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. That was the first exposure I had to high-quality information about the world on an incredible variety of topics. It was such a great feeling sitting in a beautiful library surrounded by books in silence isolated from the chaotic and noisy world outside. I get that now all information we can possib…

I've noticed that all Americans (and probably all English speaking countries) knows the animal Aardvark. Here in Denmark few do (where its called Jordsvin - Earthhog)- I speculate that the reason is, that English encyclopedias would mention it on the first page of the first volume and probably with a picture given its somewhat peculiar looks, and can't help to think that the Aardvark might be forgotten, now that few consumes encyclopedias the old way :-)

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#75

Post by leoxv »

Encarta (1993-2009) was a big inspiration to start the Conzept encyclopedia project. Still much more to do to reach the audio-visual wow-factor and sheer fun that Encarta had, especially for children.

Conzept is an attempt to create an encyclopedia for the 21st century. A modern topic-exploration tool based on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Open Library, GBIF and other information sources.

Please check it out here: https://conze.pt

There are also various screenshots of the feature progress on Twitter which give a sense of what is already possible: https://twitter.com/conzept__

For the future I am also looking into adding some WebXR enhancements (such as eg. for more immersive image viewing) and some form of social meetups around topics.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#76

Post by patrec »

exDM69 wrote: post #59
patrec wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for storage (and thus offline) purposes it is of course exactly a zero sum game. I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images. However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.

> I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images. There are several offline snapshots of different sizes of Wikipedia that do exactly this. Some of them are more thoroughly curated, others are a snapshot of the most popular articles, etc. What I could not find easily was a full English Wikipedia with images and all available in an e…

I am aware that there are various offline wikipedia compilations and I am grateful they exist and to the people who work on them, but last I looked using them looked like a bit of pain, and on checking again that still appears to be the case. I get the impression that if I want to have something of decent quality that fits into the 10s of GiB range I'd consider reasonable¹, I'd have to manually munge together several non-Pokemon topics I consider important plus one of the text only dumps. This would be more palatable if I had a strong impression that once I hit upon a working process I could rinse-and-repeat on a yearly basis.

Do you have any experience with this?

¹E.g. the 100k top article page linked by sibling does not look super promising, ~700 math articles vs ~10k fluff (sports, entertainment etc.).

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#77

Post by MaxBarraclough »

jxf wrote: post #12
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…

Part of the value of Encarta was in the human curation of what was interesting. Wikipedia includes (by necessity) everything — but an encyclopedia would probably devote more space to (say) Nigerian history than to (say) the in-game statistics of all ~1,000 Pokémon.

I recall reading that there was a time the Wikipedia article on the lightsaber was longer than the article on the printing press. No longer the case, thankfully.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#78

Post by swiley »

patrec wrote: post #43
p1necone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the sort of person who writes Wikipedia articles about Pokemon would not go and write articles about Nigerian history instead if Pokemon articles were not allowed, and vice versa. Wikipedia contributions are not really a zero sum game.

Well, for storage (and thus offline) purposes it is of course exactly a zero sum game. I for one would really like a say 3 GiB version of English Wikipedia without Pokemon and Porn, or a 33GiB version with useful images. However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.

Meh. Even my phone can store the entire text of English Wikipedia and still have half the storage left over for sloppy OS and App code.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#79

Post by mister_hn »

I remember when I've got the Encarta 1995 and I was light years ahead of my school friends when doing researches and gather material.

I guess an hypothetical Encarta 2020 would not even fit in 5/6 Blue Rays, especially considering the better quality of images and videos

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#80

Post by wil421 »

cheschire wrote: post #61
scoutt wrote: post #60

I also remember the CD-ROM era (and before that). It was also the time when software just worked. There was no other way. The content on those CDs was permanent. Software rarely needed an updated, it didn't called home with telemetry and it didn't needed a constant internet connection to work. There wasn't subscription models for most of the software. So you want to do some 3D renderings? Just install this CD with 3D…

I don't remember this time. I remember a time when we blamed the operating system constantly for what was just as often an application memory management failure and thought that rebooting 4 times a day was normal.

I remember what you do. Windows pop ups every hour, multiple reboots, blue screens out of no where, hardware issues, and having to upgrade via CDs. Oh shit I scratched my windows update disk!
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