I Miss Microsoft Encarta

One word for Encarta and the like: Edutainment.

It came with a parallel port dongle -not mentioned in the box copy- to ensure that the precious was not shared.

It did not work right, and I was cured of buying that stuff.

She used to be a librarian. Then she was a geographer. The old school kind, the one that actually drew actual maps. The librarian skills really came in handy when drawing real maps. Everything had to be right. People could get lost in the wilderness and be using your map, or countries could be drawing international borders based on your map, war could break out over your mistakes. The printers and early dot-matrix printers put her whole department out of business though. That was fine, my siblings and I came along about then anyway.

I was too young to remember, but I think it was Encarta 95. I remember standing there next to Mom as she fired up the new program, my sister sat on her lap. She wasn't very tech savy, still isn't. We helped her out a bit with the mouse and clicking into everything.

We looked up East Germany first thing. Mom wanted to make sure Encarta was correct, right, true. We knew East Germany wasn't a thing anymore, even though a lot of the maps in school and in our children's books were saying it still was a thing. It took a while back then for things to percolate. Mom wanted to make sure this thing was as up to date as possible.

She typed it in, it took us to an index page, Mom clicked on the top listing (I think). We read a bit about East Germany. It had an end date. Mom was happy. This resource will do for her family. Then there was a bit of text that was underlined. Mom hovered over the underlined text. It said to click on the underlined text to go to that page. My sister squirmed a bit.

Mom clicked and then the internet came crashing into our house like an asteroid or an artillery shell or an earthquake; the floor was left behind. Everything changed in an instant.

It took us, automatically, to the linked page. I think I was about unified Germany. But it did it instantly. Boom, there you were. Reading.

Mom cried.

It was at that moment that Mom understood. No more card catalogs. No more having to hunt the shelves. No more having to look in the index for the page numbers, jamming your fingers in the back while you flipped through the tome. No more walking and sitting back down. No more having to ask strangers to watch your bags while you went diving into the stacks. No more checked out books you were looking for.

Just. Click. And. Read.

I asked her what was wrong. My sister was not happy with Mom crying. Mom was a bit flabberghasted. She told me about all the effort that went into just getting the information, all the time you lost, all the excitment that drained. And how that was no more. How it was so easy to read and to learn, now. The world was going to be so good for her children, for me, for my sister and my other siblings.

Mom cried in joy.

Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. On medicine, zoology and other sciences, it's occasionally surprising how we used to think. I'd periodically pick it up and read a few entries at random, and often disappear down a rabbit hole. At some point it stopped being obsolete and pointless to become fascinating history.

That's one thing Encarta could have been had it continued - a valuable snapshot of how thought and knowledge evolved. Always updated Wikipedia can and will never be that as sadly you can't snapshot a given date, and digging through edit histories is horribly unfriendly. We may have lost something there.

It was a killer app for CD-ROM, but for the title of the killer app I'd say DeLorme's "Street Atlas USA" had at least an equal claim.