Ask HN: Was there an online encyclopedia during the 1980s?

#1

Post by v37p » Thu, May 07, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

I was recently inspired to investigate after watching the scene[0] in Ghostbusters II where Egon pulls up a record from the "Occult Reference Net".

I am aware that people were able (and still able) to connect to bulletin boards and library catalogs via telnet, but was there such a thing as a "reference net" for general topics? If so, do any still exist?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBRE-RzLg5M

Re: Ask HN: Was there an online encyclopedia during the 1980s?

#2

Post by jjgreen » Thu, May 07, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

There was the "Domesday Project" in 1986, not online (per se) but on huge laserdisks (300 MB each side!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

Re: Ask HN: Was there an online encyclopedia during the 1980s?

#3

Post by pagutierrezn » Thu, May 07, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

Have a look at Minitel:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel There were lots of interesting initiatives within this network

Re: Ask HN: Was there an online encyclopedia during the 1980s?

#4

Post by wsh » Fri, May 08, 2020, 3:04 AM UTC

Yes, there were commercial, online information services in the 1980s, and some of these included access to an encyclopedia, such as the one published by Grolier. Here’s a directory, from the November 1986 issue of InfoWorld magazine:

https://books.google.com/books?id=jzwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA39&ots=...

These services were relatively expensive, and I’m not sure how many users would have paid the per-minute or per-record charges just for access to text from a general-interest encyclopedia, which at that time, would have been available in print in nearly all libraries and in some classrooms and homes.

Dialog (https://dialog.com/) still exists, and public and academic libraries continue to offer their patrons access to a wide range of subscription-only reference databases.