
Ask HN: Was there an online encyclopedia during the 1980s? - v37p
I was recently inspired to investigate after watching the scene[0] in Ghostbusters II where Egon pulls up a record from the &quot;Occult Reference Net&quot;.<p>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 &quot;reference net&quot; for general topics? If so, do any still exist?<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vBRE-RzLg5M
======
wsh
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=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=jzwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA39&ots=i1a2thKkwc&pg=PA39)

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/](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.

------
pagutierrezn
Have a look at
Minitel:[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel)
There were lots of interesting initiatives within this network

------
jjgreen
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project)

