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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#391

Post by hoyd »

elboru wrote: post #338
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 kind of comment is the exact reason why I keep coming back to HN. It's great to read stories of real people who have worked in all kinds of amazing and inspiring projects, thanks for sharing your experience with us, it's always nice to read about technical details of legendary software.

Totally agree

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#392

Post by simonh »

tern wrote: post #320
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…

For the ~95th–99th percentile wealth class, the world has changed considerably. For instance, I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently. As a business owner, I can find an international market for my product in a matter of months. I can get anywhere I need to without owning a car. I can maintain a high salary while living in a remote location, of traveling. For t…

Life for ordinary Britons has changed enormously in my lifetime. In my youth it was unusual for someone to holiday abroad, now it's routine.

A budget flight to the continent and a week in an AirBnB in Europe can cost as little as a few hundred quid. Something that was only really available to the rich, or at least the very well off, is now available to almost anyone.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#393

Post by kragen »

simonh wrote: post #392
tern wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the ~95th–99th percentile wealth class, the world has changed considerably. For instance, I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently. As a business owner, I can find an international market for my product in a matter of months. I can get anywhere I need to without owning a car. I can maintain a high salary while living in a remote location, of traveling. For t…

Life for ordinary Britons has changed enormously in my lifetime. In my youth it was unusual for someone to holiday abroad, now it's routine. A budget flight to the continent and a week in an AirBnB in Europe can cost as little as a few hundred quid. Something that was only really available to the rich, or at least the very well off, is now available to almost anyone.

Ordinary Britons may not be in the 95th to 99th percentile wealth class, but they're in the 90th to 99th percentile. But I don't think that what you're talking about is a question of technology, much less of the internet — it's a matter of deregulation and political alignment, something that is coming to an end with Brexit. Aviation technology advanced in leaps and bounds from the 1890s to the 1960s and has only improved incrementally since 1970. (And of course we no longer have Concorde at any price.)

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#394

Post by simonh »

kragen wrote: post #393
simonh wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life for ordinary Britons has changed enormously in my lifetime. In my youth it was unusual for someone to holiday abroad, now it's routine. A budget flight to the continent and a week in an AirBnB in Europe can cost as little as a few hundred quid. Something that was only really available to the rich, or at least the very well off, is now available to almost anyone.

Ordinary Britons may not be in the 95th to 99th percentile wealth class, but they're in the 90th to 99th percentile. But I don't think that what you're talking about is a question of technology, much less of the internet — it's a matter of deregulation and political alignment, something that is coming to an end with Brexit. Aviation technology advanced in leaps and bounds from the 1890s to the 1960s and has only impr…

If we're talking outside the western world, things have changed far more dramatically. Across the developing world, hundreds of millions of people have risen out of abject poverty. My wife grew up in China, in a house her father built from a pile of bricks provided by his employer. She helped make their floor tiles, and this was in an industrial city. China's a different world now, and while they are the poster child, this trend isn't isolated to them. The chart linked below is astounding.

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/global-income-distribu...

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#395

Post by hollerith »

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…

>the internet was still a few years away

Internet history fairy here to make sure people know that the internet has been in continuous operation since 1969 [1]. (And DARPA started funding research for the express purpose of creating a global computer network in 1960.)

What was still a few years away in '91 is awareness or interest in the internet by a significant fraction of consumers (or by Bill Gates for that matter).

[1]: Some people would deny the name "internet" to any network prior to the introduction of the internet protocol suite in 1982, but it was the same user-visible services (email, ftp, telnet, netnews, etc) running on both the earlier network that began operation in 1969 and the later network that some want to reserve the name "internet" for. In other words, the switch in 1983 from NCP to TCP/IP was mostly transparent to users.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#396

Post by kragen »

simonh wrote: post #394
kragen wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ordinary Britons may not be in the 95th to 99th percentile wealth class, but they're in the 90th to 99th percentile. But I don't think that what you're talking about is a question of technology, much less of the internet — it's a matter of deregulation and political alignment, something that is coming to an end with Brexit. Aviation technology advanced in leaps and bounds from the 1890s to the 1960s and has only impr…

If we're talking outside the western world, things have changed far more dramatically. Across the developing world, hundreds of millions of people have risen out of abject poverty. My wife grew up in China, in a house her father built from a pile of bricks provided by his employer. She helped make their floor tiles, and this was in an industrial city. China's a different world now, and while they are the poster child…

Is this because of the internet?

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#397

Post by unilynx »

Crinus wrote: post #364
vonseel wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's already happening with new protocols not running on their own TCP port, but being 'tunneled' over HTTPS on port 443 (eg DNS over HTTPS).

At some point we can optimize away the IP and TCP layers.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#398

Post by cryptoz »

timwaagh wrote: post #348
cryptoz wrote: post #138

I miss Encarta, but most of all I miss Mindmaze.

Never heard of it. Care to enlighten me?

It was a quiz game based on information in the Encarta Encyclopedia. You would uncover areas of a castle or something like that, as you gained knowledge and correctly answered questions.

This looks like a video of the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmudzYWY94

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#399

Post by blueboo »

smacktoward wrote: post #186
blueboo wrote: post #123

People 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.

Their grandparents might! Kids have already learned how to sift through the dross .. it’s internet survival 101.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#400

Post by jqcoffey »

vonseel wrote: post #347
scarface74 wrote: post #284

Earlier 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…

> Makes you wonder, will there ever be a replacement for the Internet?

Google. Circa 2030.

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