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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

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Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#91

Post by theandrewbailey »

Aardwolf wrote: post #56
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…

Hmm, to me the term "multimedia PC" already sounded outdated from the start, similar to the "a CD ROM can contain a whole library shelf worth of data" hype. I just thought like, this 386 PC could make sound and graphics and games. This Pentium can do it too, granted with more colors and a CD ROM drive and a fancy "where do you want to go today" movie, but does that warrant all this hype of being called "multimedia"?…

I see your multimedia PC, and raise you an "information superhighway". That sounded cringey from the start.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#93

Post by cyberdrunk »

danielbarla wrote: post #71
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 th…

Even 386 was absolutely crushing A1200 in some respects. In Amigas, you had to set every bit of a pixel separately, which didn't hurt for 2D games with static art assets (which you just copied from memory onto the screen), but it was a killer for anything 3D based. In result, you could have a 386 run Doom IIRC, whereas 3d shooters on Amiga 1200 were much worse than even Wolfenstein 3D.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#94

Post by cookiecaper »

thdrdt wrote: post #70
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 miss the state of development from that time. I was developing multimedia CD content with software like Director and Authorware[1]. We had a project and when it was released the project was clearly done. Today projects don't finish because continuous integration is a never ending story. [1] I also miss this kinds of visual programming sometimes. Authorware was very underrated imho.

I'm not familiar with Authorware specifically, but there's a whole lost world where computing was extremely rich in visuality, dynamism, and play, and the striking thing is that these qualities were expected to enhance peoples' useful output. Some of the early Smalltalk demos exhibit this beautifully, and they're from the 70s. It almost feels like the era of "rich media" embodied by Encarta, "animated storybooks", etc., was the dying gasp of that conceptualization.

The common association with computers as mechanisms of boredom, exclusion, and wage slavery is so strong now that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously countenancing the old paradigm that the technology was meant to allow. I don't know whether that outcome was ultimately inevitable or not, but either way, it's massively disappointing.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#95

Post by danielbarla »

cyberdrunk wrote: post #93
danielbarla wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Even 386 was absolutely crushing A1200 in some respects. In Amigas, you had to set every bit of a pixel separately, which didn't hurt for 2D games with static art assets (which you just copied from memory onto the screen), but it was a killer for anything 3D based. In result, you could have a 386 run Doom IIRC, whereas 3d shooters on Amiga 1200 were much worse than even Wolfenstein 3D.

Oh yes, and Wolfenstein actually ran quite well even on a 286. Higher res and framerate than same time period Amiga titles. Aside from the additional inefficiency you mentioned, I think 3D is an area where none of the Amiga's specialised hardware chipsets helped (or at least, nowhere near enough / as much as they did with 2D), and the CPU performance disparity started to really show.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#96

Post by fsloth »

coldpie wrote: post #87
asiachick wrote: post #82

I don't know if miss Encarta but it does point out that in some ways Wikipedia feels like a step backward. Sure, wikipedia has more topics but where's a video? Where's the interactive explanations? Wikipedia feels like a 25yr old website. I know some people like that but it feels like a missed opportunity and stagnation to me

That's way more effort than writing some text. That kind of content doesn't make itself for free.

This. If we get tools that enables simple creation of video/interactive assets then Wikipedia will get those more. As a life long graphics geek and programmer, currently the content creation ecosystem is not really on "bicycle" level - more like unicycle while juggling chainsaws - although it's getting better. I mean I've done graphics stuff all my life, and would be quite lost how to "do a quick animation" in something closer to 15 minutes than 15 hours or 15 days.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#97

Post by cesarb »

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 also remember the CD-ROM era (and before that). It was also the time when software just worked.

Except when it didn't. Keeping with the Encyclopedia theme, it was usual back then to buy an yearly book to update your paper encyclopedia; once we stopped buying these (the last one we have is from 2009), the vendor convinced us to buy a "Grande Barsa DVD" (version 6.0). It doesn't work at all unless you first download and install a small patch, which was easy to find back then but now seems to have disappeared from the web.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#98

Post by exDM69 »

patrec wrote: post #76
exDM69 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have the ~80GB "full english" snapshot I grabbed some time ago and use with Kiwix. It's not quite "full", it doesn't have quite all images and video, etc. But the size is still reasonable for a desktop/laptop PC.

I also have a 10GB snapshot on my phone, but it's a bit lacking. I don't have enough storage on my phone to fit the bigger one. But a battery powered offline Wikipedia is high on my list of necessary things in case things go south.

I haven't found a great way to keep these synced up, glad to hear if someone has a good solution for up-to-date offline wikipedia.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#99

Post by zrobotics »

agumonkey wrote: post #53
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…

It's odd, I'd rather go to a library and read a book than dig on the web now. to be honest: I like the web for shallow access, but when I need focus and depth, a library and a book is way more fit for my brain.

Although if you are after focus and depth, arguably you would be reading some sort of primary source rather than an encyclopedia. I've definitely been at a library, had a quick question on something tangentially related to what I'm reading, and pulled up Wikipedia on my phone to quickly look something up. I wouldn't want to read a whole book on a phone, since I agree with you that I can more easily absorb information from an actual book. That being said, looking up something on my phone is far less distracting than having to get up, put the book down, and go over to look something up in an encyclopedia or dictionary.
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