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I Miss Microsoft Encarta

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Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#401

Post by iconjack »

I worked on Encarta in the mid 90s. Here are a few tidbits you may or may not find interesting.

* The content was based on Funk & Wagnalls. Then we had a bunch of editors and writers cleaning up the content and adding new articles.

* The Windows version was always done first, then we ported to the Mac using "WLM" (Windows Library for Mac?).

* We used fractal compression for the images. If you never heard of this, look it up—pretty interesting. This was going to be all the rage, but then it wasn't.

* As a consumer product, Christmas sales were everything. Therefore, unlike most software, the schedule never slipped. There was a hard date for completion. Features would be cut to make the deadline, no matter what.

* When the web hit, we put professionally curated links into the articles. Best of both worlds. And you could get a subscription that would update articles and links monthly.

* We worked with WBUR to implement a brand-new closed captioning standard for videos.

* The codebase was ostensibly C++ and MFC, but it..was..complicated.

* Articles were edited in Word, with a bunch of custom macros, and exported to RTF. There was a lot more processing that went on after that to shove all that content onto the CD, but I wasn't too familiar with that part.

* Later versions occupied more than one CD. Swapping was a real pain, but if you had multiple CD-ROM drives, it would accommodate you.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#402

Post by pyrale »

rusk wrote: post #366
pyrale wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shorta…

The only reason you can build a city in a desert is the abundance of cheap energy and the ability to build what it needs elsewhere. These two conditions are not met in an hypothetic refuge.

As for soil, the creation of soil in Ireland and the UK took quite a bit of time.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#403

Post by scarface74 »

Retric wrote: post #329
scarface74 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2008 was peak iPod and they started declining after that. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quart... Note FYQ1 is calendar quarter 4.

As a brand sure, but the iPhone has been a fair replacement for many people. I mean digital camera sales have dropped 84% since 2010, but if anything people are taking far more photos now. For most people cellphones have mostly replaced watches, digital cameras, keychain flashlights, and MP3 players not because they are awesome at it but because having slightly better but largely redundant devices is not worth it. ht…

I agree, and that’s kind of my point. Microsoft didn’t abandon Encarta because of corporate stupidity. It’s time had passed.

The iPod’s time had passed and the iPod Touch could just as well be called an iPad Nano. It’s more of an iPad than iPod.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#404

Post by joblessjunkie »

hollerith wrote: post #395
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 matte…

You are of course correct; mea culpa.

We had internet; what we didn't yet have was HTTP.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#405

Post by joblessjunkie »

shortformblog wrote: post #37

Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity elements of Encarta make it something that you kind of wish had a more direct role in the modern day. I wrote about this topic a few years ago ( https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/ ), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to…

I appreciated this article. I agree that "Microsoft was never in it for the history."

Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives.

The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks.

CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail.

It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#406

Post by rusk »

pyrale wrote: post #402
rusk wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shorta…

The only reason you can build a city in a desert is the abundance of cheap energy and the ability to build what it needs elsewhere. These two conditions are not met in an hypothetic refuge. As for soil, the creation of soil in Ireland and the UK took quite a bit of time.

You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. You talking out your arse.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#407

Post by hollerith »

joblessjunkie wrote: post #404
hollerith wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 matte…

You are of course correct; mea culpa. We had internet; what we didn't yet have was HTTP.

No, we had HTTP in '91, but the web was small and consisted almost entirely of information about physics and computing.

And we didn't yet have a graphical web browser that ran on Windows or Mac. And MSDOS was AFAIK never adapted to allow the computer to interact with the user while something was downloading or uploading. (I.e., it lacked the necessary kind of multitasking.)

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#408

Post by 1stcity3rdcoast »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #290
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…

> In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC Interesting, as the 486 came out in late '89. Seems you'd like a little more oomph, but perhaps they were too expensive at the time.

A good point, so I just looked it up. This April 1991 ad [0] shows 386 desktops with a hard drive at around $2000 in 1991 prices, and the comparable 486 models with a hard drive start at $7300.

To put that in perspective, $2000 in 1991 is $3700 in today’s dollars, and the 486 would be a staggering $13,500 today.

[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/InfoWorld.html?id=0FAEA...

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#409

Post by mixmastamyk »

1stcity3rdcoast wrote: post #408
mixmastamyk wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC Interesting, as the 486 came out in late '89. Seems you'd like a little more oomph, but perhaps they were too expensive at the time.

A good point, so I just looked it up. This April 1991 ad [0] shows 386 desktops with a hard drive at around $2000 in 1991 prices, and the comparable 486 models with a hard drive start at $7300. To put that in perspective, $2000 in 1991 is $3700 in today’s dollars, and the 486 would be a staggering $13,500 today. [0] https://books.google.com/books/about/InfoWorld.html?id=0FAEA...

Interesting, I do remember 2000+ dollar computers in that time period, but $3700!?

Although '91 is earlier than I got back into PCs, strongest memories are probably more around '93, '94. The 486SX might have been the ~$2000 computer at that time. I remember later having the AMD 386/40 and 486/100 made better performance affordable.

Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta

#410

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

Interesting question.

"Replacement in what sense?" probably deserves exploration.

The underlying fundamental concepts of the Internet are 1) packet-switched (as opposed to through-circuit) communications, and inter-connected networks, via BGP.

There's a lot that's layered on top of this which is seen as fundamental, but is not entirely so, most especially end-to-end connectivity and universal point-to-point access. The Internet formed under tremendously different conditions than exist today, with only a handful of nodes through 1980, and even as late as the late 1980s only a few thousands.

Roughly each order-of-magnitude increases since then seem to have come with its own set of additional headaches and concerns, mostly regarding management and mitigation of abuse. The idea of guarded borders has long been seen as anathema. I see it as all but inevitable, and the question is whether that's done well or poorly.

There are a number of earlier networking ideas which might resurface or be adapted for new use, and a survey of history might be useful here. (John S. Quarterman's The Matrix, 1990, is a fascinating time-capsule exploration of these just at the cusp of the modern Internet -- the World Wide Web does not even make mention, though "The Web, a national Canadian nonprofit conferencing system formed in 1987, does.

I'd also look at uses of the Internet and user needs.

Fundamentally, digital networks serve as communications and control media. Whether or not these need to (or can be) segregated is an open question, but splitting off, say, the IoT from other communications, might make sense, along with SCADA and military communications -- all largely control networks.

Splitting out video and voice from text and data, likewise. Much of high-demand comes from those.

As the Internet heads from the first billion or two users to the remaining five or so, questions of what technology, interfaces, and devices are appropriate for a set of digital newcomers may be worth consideration.

Or, looking at this differently: the degree to which those already here may be interested in maintaining a separate space for themselves. Not that this is necessarily equitable, but it may well prove to be attractive, say, in particular to minimise fraud and other malicious use or attacks originating from the global poor, who are in many ways justified in wanting some of the pie that's been denied to, or taken from, them.

How the needs, wants, attractions, and/or detractors or aversions affect technology development and adoption remains to be seen.

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