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How do I get a peek into this world according to Chuck slice of cyberspace?
An interesting question that I have yet to have a good answer for. The fair use exemption was pretty good air cover for using the digitized data, but text book publishers are rather litigious bunch. Not a bear I want to poke just yet.
One of my favorite CD-ROMs from my childhood was an Encarta offshoot called Microsoft Exploropedia, World of Nature. Basically Encarta for natural sciences but tailored for kids. That game was the bomb.
I remember watching that video. I was dazzled by the novelty of it and immediately tried searching for all videos and playing all I could find on the CD-ROM.
Just to compare I perused the Wikipedia "moon landing" page to compare. At first I was surprised that I couldn't find this video. Then I realized there's a separate entry specifically for the Apollo 11 mission. It links to the following page:
https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/
... which as a whole HTML5 interface to go back and experience the launch in realtime.
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?
Edit: wording
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0788157930/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
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 remember getting Encarta 95 back when it first came out (I was 14 at the time) and the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information and got me that much more invested in learning technology. Literally a week after getting Encarta a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house and I showed him why I did not need his books. You could see the look of terror in h…
I would also add that I miss Microsoft Cinemania ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cinemania ), which was to IMDB what Encarta was to Wikipedia. The sad bit is that in some ways Cinemania in 1997 was superior to IMDB as it is today . IMDB is more comprehensive, but Cinemania was better designed and more fun to just browse through.
What I remember most about Encarta is how impossible the "Mind Maze" game was as a kid
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I am 24 and very much remember it! Simpler days!
26 here... I think Encarta was one of the first CD-ROMS we owned (Compton was later, er, acquired surreptitiously). I still remember the joy I had researching the Stegosaurus and the Platypus between my local library and my copy of Encarta for a school project <3.
I miss it as well, as the author points out it isn't large and is easily contained on a thumbnail flash drive (several times over!). I've started creating an offline reference library[1] because I see that search engines will be over whelmed with crap and frankly I don't want to have to find cell service to ask my handheld device to locate a factoid. If you've read that now more than 50% of Google desktop searches do…