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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

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Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#101

Post by elboru »

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…

It also included great multimedia (images, audio, video, animations). I remember myself spending hours watching all kinds of physics animations.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#102

Post by ubermonkey »

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.

HAHAHAHAHA NO.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#103

Post by Causality1 »

"Multimedia" doesn't really exist anymore in the polished way it used to. If you want to learn about, say, Lewis and Clark, you could look it up on Wikipedia where you can find some pictures and a few source links where you can track down more info. Or you could watch a video about it on YouTube. Twenty years ago you could buy a single CD that would interweave video, audio, text, pictures, and interactive elements into a cohesive whole that felt much more alive. Is today's free information better than yesterday's expensive information? Probably, but I'd still point to Microsoft Dinosaurs if I wanted to light a fire in the heart of a child.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#104

Post by stuff4ben »

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.

But they get millions of dollars in donations every year.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#105

Post by samoa42 »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #88
hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would expect that for most people the time period where there was overlap between config.sys tinkering, Windows, and BBS was pretty small. And likely even less overlap with the era where "3D Studio was on a CDROM". And to be honest I have always found these stories of "ohmygod I need one extra K of unfragmented low memory, time to tinker with config.sys again" way overblown. I would just do this selective boot thin…

> "ohmygod I need one extra K of unfragmented low memory, time to tinker with config.sys again"

i know a lot of ppl went deep down the rabbit hole of computers because of this.

thou the period _was_ short because memory got bigger/cheaper and then win95 came along with 32bit and virtual memory.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#106

Post by patrec »

monort wrote: post #69
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…

What's wrong with kiwix snapshot of English wikipedia? It's only 93GB. http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_max...

Well, I was hoping for less than 93GiB compressed, given that this exceeds the storage capacity of several devices I'd like to use it on and I'd estimate the total amount of info I care about to be far smaller than that. And small is beautiful: if everything fits into ram, you can do various interesting data munging tasks on the data (which is after all not uninteresting) very quickly.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#107

Post by mekkkkkk »

cookiecaper wrote: post #94
thdrdt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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", et…

I'm not sure were it would be on a timeline compared to Encarta, but I'd add the hay days of Flash on the web to that. Much like you describe there was such a sense of fun in those days. Flash had enough abstraction and was simple enough for anyone to create weird animations and sites with interesting interactions.

The website feels like a stale medium today. I guess it's just too important to mess with nowadays. Pragmatism and familiarity rule supreme.

PS. I'm sure I'm biased because nostalgia. Flash web was a nightmare in many (most?) respects.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#109

Post by mekkkkkk »

p1necone wrote: post #19
jxf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

If they were employed to do so, they would. A curated encyclopedia with paid researchers would not be bound by the whims of weebs.

Re: I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

#110

Post by xtracto »

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #73
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…

You are thinking of DOS / Win 3.11 era. I also had to play with DMA and irq jumpers.

Gp post is thinking on Win 95 to XP era. When CDs were common but internet was usually 56k .

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