It was one of the first software I had when I got my first computer. To me it was the internet and I spent hours reading all the entries and interacting with the audio and video that come with it.
I Miss Microsoft Encarta
361–370 of 419 posts
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#362Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#363Earlier 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…
Cashless and bankless society. I moved to London last year and have used cash roughly zero times since. Visiting my parents (outside London) is like jumping in to treacle. Finding coins for the bus? Paper tickets on the train? Give me a god damn break. Even using chip and pin is weird now since almost all my purchases, except for dining out, are either touchless, online, or via mobile app. In 20 years i think cash (b…
> Cashless and bankless society.
I live in backwards South Africa, and even I can't remember the last time I needed to use cash. So I'm totally with you on that one.
But bankless? Eh, I think we are at least two or tree decades away from that.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Internet went from exceedingly obscure to global in the ten years of the 1990s. This reminds me of the infamous Today show segment circa 1994. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A
Makes you wonder, will there ever be a replacement for the Internet? What would that look like? An incompatible sister network that offers something the existing internet does not offer? A new network created after major disasters and world wide nuclear war destroy all existing infrastructure? I can’t imagine the existing internet would ever be replaced, certainly not by something offering privacy like ToR, because n…
Chances are, just like modern internet took advantage of old communication technology (telephone wires) to spread, the "next" internet will take advantage of the "current" one.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#365> 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! For most of us, this was the first time we'd ever seen full-motion video on-demand on a computer in any sort of fidelity - and these are mostly 320x240 or smaller videos! I remember watching that vi…
> I'm going to watch it later, but I'll ask ahead of time-- is the author really stating that the feeling of watching that single video on Encarta was more enthralling than what I'll experience with that HTML5 interface?
It is also very possible that the author didn't knew about the page you linked, which is another "issue" with Internet vs Encarta: you can find way more information on the Internet at way more depth, but... you need to find it first. Encarta was comparatively very little information and depth but everything it has is by design easily discoverable.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There’s not going to be such thing’s around Heretofor uninhabitable places such as ... greenland maybe?
Greenland barely has soil. Take a look at the bed of a former glacier, and count the trees.
It depends on where you look. Glaciers pick up material for sure, but where they melt, it is all deposited as glacial till which provides nice heavy soil for agriculture. As Greenland thaws, all this stuff will be deposited upon it. Ireland for instance, and parts of the UK have been beneficiaries of this.
Also, worth considering is that it is virgin territory for exploration for minerals and other goodies.
No shortage of water either.
But even all that aside, it is newly available space. If you can build a city in a desert (Phoenix, Arizona lets say) you can build one on Greenland.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#367off topic: If you have a raspberry pi zero w and a large SD card you can download kiwix an offline wikipedia reader that has a built in webserver. It is amazing how you can download wikidedia full or subsets of it and have it running out of a raspi w zero. I am working on a walkthrough on how to do it so I will be posting an article soon.
You don't need an RPi, kiwix is available for desktop OS as well as phones. Why carry around another device instead of the computer in your pocket?
Some people do not want to block that much storage on their phone, but usually for Raspberry Pi the use case is that you can pretty much broadcast Wikipedia within a classroom without the need for an install on each and every device (it may also be kinda cool to have your own private Wikipedia network at home so nobody knows you are browsing this or that topic - I know Stallman mentioned using Kiwix once).
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#368Earlier 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…
> The technology of written works has undergone several seismic shifts, from clay tablet to papyrus roll to codex to moveable type. This confuses a number of different types of technology. For example, we haven't undergone a shift from codices -- we still use that form for all our written works today. Clay and papyrus are materials on which text is written. Scroll and codex are physical forms in which long texts are…
I'm compressing thoughts for brevity. The codex, handwritten, allowed random access, but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy. They were chained, the language was standardised -- you brought readers to the work (Latin) rather than works to readers (vernacular).
Moveable type, cheap paper, mass literacy, vernacular language, typographic conventions, high-speed presses, and mass distribution, create a wholly different impact.
As Elizabeth Eisenstein noted, the printing press is an agent of social change. Generalised, all comms tech is.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were earlier systems in the 1980s that combined PCs (or equivalent machines) with Pioneer LaserDisc systems (which could be controlled via a serial port) - a somewhat well known one was the BBC Domesday Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project An early glimpse of the future, somewhat.
Man what a mess of a project that was.
If only they had waited ten or so years.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you kidding me? The only way hearing the opening screen again[0] could evoke more warm fuzzy nostalgia with me is if at the end it would crossfade into Baba Yetu from Civ IV's main menu screen[1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e0Qelqp-Cc
Though Encarta evokes a bit more of Civ VI Sogno di Volare to me, but I share the sentiment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQYN2P3E06s Besides Encarta , the mid 90s where also the time where I was first able to buy satellite imagery on CR-ROM for all of Germany from my collected lunch money and years before Microsoft's TerraServer changed the world, which itself was long before Google Maps took over. https://www.vi…
Either way, Microsoft should bring back Encarta and hire Christopher Tin to compose something for the occasion ;)