Jake Knapp, a designer that started his career on Encarta, gave a huge nod to the product journey in his Design Sprint talk in london a while back.
I Miss Microsoft Encarta
181–190 of 419 posts
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#182I loved Encarta (it must have been 1997 or so?)! I must have watched that double split experiment animation on quantum mechanics dozens of times! It felt like looking the Universe into its soul... It may even have contributed to me becoming a scientist.
Edit: Found the movie!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnhqqISBSA
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#183Wikipedia could do a better job integrating media. I remember Encarta being pretty good about having video files showing the outlines of wars and battles... at least for the Vietnam War which is what I remember most. I prefer watching a video outline of wars and battles on youtube rather than dig right into a wall of text on wikipedia.
I still remember using one of the earliest Encarta versions and seeing a tiny postage stamp sized video animate and play some half broken wav file for the first time. I remember it hitting me like a baseball bat: we can do VIDEOS on computers now! This will change everything! TV is going to die because there are no ads on computers!
Look on the bright side, you got two out of three right :D
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a Fujitsu Scansnap 1500 and a heavy duty paper guillotine (basically a very sharp, very tall blade, kind of like this one on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/HFS-Heavy-Guillotine-Paper-Cutter/dp/... ). The ScanSnap came with a license to Abbyy's OCR software (which is good for words but it makes for interesting jumbles when you have tables and of course no math recognition). And the Foxit PDF editor version. Sin…
Ah, I should have guessed it would be a destructive process. Still something I'll keep in mind but I have a particular weakness about destroying old books, even if intellectually I understand 1) it's not a valuable book and 2) there are other copies out there and 3) it's worth more to me in PDF form.
The process used by the Internet Archive and Google for digitizing books is nondestructive; the Archive open-sourced the plans for their "Scribe" book-scanning machine, and others have made downloadable plans for laser-cuttable versions. It's slower than running a destroyed book through a sheeet-fed scanner (typically you get on the order of ten two-page scans per minute), but it's suitable even for rare books.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#185The thing about Encarta to me is that it felt so much more interactive than what we have today. Nowadays we read a Wikipedia article or watch a Youtube video on a topic but never interact with the content. It's all very passive. I was a child during the heyday of Encarta and I remember I had it and a few other specialized encyclopedias (one about animals, one about sea life, one about dinosaurs!!) and they were all i…
I never mess interactivity when browsing Wikipedia. I love that WP is text-based, so that I can read it in my own preferred tempo. I rarely watch videos since to me they always feel too slow compared to reading text. I understand on an intellectual level that Youtube is a great platform that provide lots of value and entertainment to lots of people, but I never feel that greatness since it’s not something that I pers…
I was randomly looking up prehistoric musical instruments the other day and I couldn't help but want to see the instruments and watch a video of them being played. It was not available on Wikipedia.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#186People fondly remember using Encarta as children. It was a child's encyclopedia for children. > In a world of 4k streaming video, global wireless, and high-speed everything, there's really no analog to the feeling we got watching the Moon Landing as a video in Encarta - short of watching it live on TV in the 1969! This is just absurd nostalgia. Even back in the author's good old days, kids also watched this stuff on…
> These days, kids watch SpaceX landing reusable rockets live on their phones.
These days kids type "space" into the YouTube app on their phone and end up watching videos telling them that the earth is actually flat.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
My parents got us a full blown Encyclopedia Britannica book set in the 80s. Probably cost $1000 which was difficult by how much they made. But they paid it down monthly. I used to have loads of fun thumbing through those books. There were a few index books where you looked up a topic and it would refer you to a page in one of the other books. Closest thing to the internet back then.
I had a World Book and then an Encyclopedia Britannica growing up. They gave me many many hours of pleasure. (I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.) And, yes, I seem to recall the price was something in the $500-$1000 ballpark. Which was definitely a lot of money in the early 70s(?) when I got it--and, yes, the salesman came to…
I inherited a 1952 World Book set from an older cousin, then part-exchanged it for a 1979 set (plus the 1980 "Year Book" update) thanks to the encyclopedia salesman. The normal price would have been around $1000 even then. Today they weigh down/stabilize one of my freestanding bookshelves in the living room.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#188One thing that commercial encyclopedias like Encarta can have that Wikipedia can’t is non-free content. Say you can buy the rights for 1000s of images from some source; you can use them in your private encyclopedia, but Wikipedia’s medias must be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and for this must be under a CC-like license or in the public domain.
This is indeed an enormous problem, and a very significant reason we need to shorten copyright terms. When copyright terms were retroactively lengthened here in Argentina, we had to delete huge swaths of historical footage and photography from Wikipedia. Into the memory hole!
Wikimedia Commons is more relaxed about licensing than Wikipedia is for text — because most of the images on Wikipedia and allied projects are not and cannot be created specifically for Wikipedia, we have to tolerate a wider spread of licensing terms. However, the images do need to be licensed for use on Wikipedia, which is already a pretty permissive license.
See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 for more social context.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#189I have dreams of Wikidata eventually being leveraged to enable similar interactivity. Currently Wikidata can store plenty of information, but there's no reason it shouldn't keep growing. Right now items already often have dates and coordinates - creating interactive maps and timelines is theoretically just a matter of implementation. Ideally, though, I want Wikidata to be so much more: why shouldn't it contain historical weather data? TV listings? Sports results? Having all of this available in an open and structured format would make all sorts of things possible, and I think we're only scratching the surface.
The other big "problem" with Wikipedia is copyright (and it's certainly not Wikipedia's fault), but there's a surprising amount of public domain work (thanks to many governments, especially the US) and of course tons of user-submitted work that ranges from bad to incredible. Other language Wikipedias can actually be more restrictive - there's no "fair use" on Japanese Wikipedia so logos are often blurred.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house That's an alien relic of an anecdote as there ever was. The world has profoundly changed in the last twenty five years. Cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing has almost completely rewired society and changed business, jobs, dating, friendship, travel. I really wonder what the next big changes will be. Cheap satellites in orbit and dramatically reduced LEO cost…
In Encarta’s case, cheap, high density storage mediums were passed by something that already existed and had existed for quite some time before, the internet. In other regards maybe the storage medium was just a side detail and the important part was what could be done with that data thanks to faster computers. There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future al…
I think the "not evenly distributed" quote is from William Gibson.