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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#261

Post by JimOk »

JimOk wrote: post #253
dredmorbius wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Encarta was being developed (~1991 per another comment here), the Internet was still highly nascent. I was at uni during this period, and a major bragging right of the campus I was on was dedicated high-speed network connections to other schools within the university system ... over 56K leased lines. Those were shared amongst the 100k+ student, faculty, and staff population (though a very small fraction of those u…

I think the phase that usurped Ecarta's position had more to do with good quality web search and to a lesser extent the crowdsourcing model of Wikipedia (run by a foundation rather than a for profit mega corporation) than to content or data standards.

The arrival of good internet search along with the ever increasing pool of web content doomed a curated content approach such as was used by Encarta (which could never aspire to be as broad or deep as the web). I can tell you, based on watching sales figures and talking to many customers, that web search was a much bigger factor for the business than was Wikipedia. In any case it would have been much trickier to get the level of crowd input given to Wikipedia by a for profit enterprise. Regardless of tools or formats used.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#262

Post by vkou »

avip wrote: post #216
echelon wrote: post #133

Earlier 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…

>I really wonder what the next big changes will be Temps up 2°C, marine ecosystems collapse, and hundreds of millions of refugees?

Yes, but will I be able to order a dog-walker from an app?

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#263

Post by riffraff »

kragen wrote: post #223
echelon wrote: post #133

Earlier 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…

I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that people socialize more in the subway than they used to, now that they can send WhatsApp audio messages to their friends instead of reading a novel. But the grocery store half a block away still sells food in much the same way they did in 1994. Bigots still yell at me on the street to go back to my own country. Most of the workforce is still employed rather t…

> International money transfers still take a significant percentage

Some do, but I can get dollars from the US into most European currencies for less than .5%.

We've come a long way from the '90s.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#264

Post by rusk »

brainpool wrote: post #247
worik wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimist

Yah. People will just die. Refugee sort of implies a refuge. There’s not going to be such thing’s around if things go south as we fear they are likely to. It’s gonna play out far more like the Old Testament.

> There’s not going to be such thing’s around

Heretofor uninhabitable places such as ... greenland maybe?

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#265

Post by Maultasche »

I know a lot of people here have fond memories of Encarta, but I found it to be a disappointment. When my family first got a copy of it with a new computer I was probably about 16 at the time (around 1994 I think) and I was excited to explore it.

I found that it had only very basic information and didn't go into any detail. I was very disappointed because I was expecting so much more information about the topics I looked at and the multimedia elements just seemed to be there to show off the technology rather than actually be useful. I put it away and never looked at Encarta again. I know wonder if there was useful information that I never found because I didn't spend enough time looking at it.

I also found many paper encyclopedias to be disappointing as well, and were only useful for giving me a short summary when I knew absolutely nothing about a topic. I really enjoyed the special Encyclopedia Britannica volumes with more in-depth articles on a smaller number of topics. Those were much better than the regular volumes with minimal information.

I think I wanted to learn so much more about the topics I was interested in, and information was hard for me to find in those days. Only my local public library had books the sufficient depth of knowledge to make me happy.

If I had known about the amazing skills of professional librarians back then, I would have had a librarian help me find information. At the time, I just thought that they were there to shelve books and check them out to people and had little other skills.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#267

Post by joblessjunkie »

akgoel wrote: post #235
joblessjunkie wrote: post #205

Encarta was part of my first job out of university. I worked in Microsoft's Multimedia Division, tasked with creating the first video and audio drivers for Windows. IIRC the BMP, WAV, and AVI file formats all came from this team at about this time. In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC with an early CD-ROM drive to demo an early build of Encarta at a trade show. It was a lot of effort to find a…

This basically sounds like WinHelp, which was a compiled format of RTF, prior to the availability of HTML.

It was in fact exactly that. The WinHelp team got folded into our group, and then WinHelp became something of an orphaned project for a while (or maybe forever?).

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#268

Post by HeavenBanned »

paulddraper wrote: post #116
oneplane wrote: post #112

We never really used Encarta, and I don't really know anyone who ever did. Right in the middle of the CD-ROMs are big and DSL just starting to become available period we got a few educational CDs that did more specialised things like only the history and current state of geographical information, or just mathematics, or just historical events of one country. No full encyclopedia was really digitally popular as the sc…

I used Encarta heavily in 6-8th grades. Internet searches were of dubious quality, and libraries were inconvenient. Encarta was the first stop for looking something up.

Anyone remember MindMaze? ...was amazing.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#269

Post by kragen »

riffraff wrote: post #263
kragen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that people socialize more in the subway than they used to, now that they can send WhatsApp audio messages to their friends instead of reading a novel. But the grocery store half a block away still sells food in much the same way they did in 1994. Bigots still yell at me on the street to go back to my own country. Most of the workforce is still employed rather t…

> International money transfers still take a significant percentage Some do, but I can get dollars from the US into most European currencies for less than .5%. We've come a long way from the '90s.

Oh, that's a good point — also it's a lot easier to convert Italian currency to French, German, or Dutch currency now, since they're all the same currency. I think that may be more a question of what the current political alignment is rather than the internet rewiring world society, though.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#270

Post by quickthrower2 »

groundlogic wrote: post #2

Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.) That said, nostalgia is fun somet…

I cam here to say similar, although I'd phrase it as "Encarta was amazing in the 90's, but with Wikipedia you get a much richer and in depth encyclopedia, albeit without the interactive/multimedia type interface that kids might prefer".

I'd also say that a monthly dump of Wikipedia to DVD/BluRay/USB would meet the offline requirements. Or as you say mobile phone internet access (for low bandwidth ... is WAP still a thing?)

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