
I Miss Microsoft Encarta - zdw
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/IMissMicrosoftEncarta.aspx
======
joblessjunkie
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 combination of hardware and drivers that would work reliably
together.

Encarta itself (at least at that time) was written as a Word document.
Hyperlinks were defined using footnotes, and animation and audio placeholders
were defined with custom OLE objects. The whole thing got exported as RTF and
fed to a compiler, which created the runtime data structures optimized for CD-
ROM access and that also built a full-text search index. The compilation was
very slow and required huge amounts of RAM.

Around this time, the team had some awareness of HTML as one of many emerging
hypertext markup languages, but the internet was still a few years away and no
one knew what format would "win" for hypertext. In any case, there were no
tools or browsers at all, so we had to build everything -- including our own
search engine for the CD-ROM.

~~~
akgoel
This basically sounds like WinHelp, which was a compiled format of RTF, prior
to the availability of HTML.

~~~
joblessjunkie
It was in fact exactly that. The WinHelp team got folded into our group, and
then WinHelp became something of an orphaned project for a while (or maybe
forever?).

~~~
doomjunky
Off topic: Thank you for getting me to research the history of the hyperlink
[1].

\- 1945 linked microfilm pages in the essay "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush
[2]

\- 1964 the term "hyperlink" in Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson

\- 1983 the "highlighted link" in HyperTIES system by Dan Ostroffin [3]

\- 1989 manifesto for the Web by Tim Berners-Lee

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#History)

[2]: [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-
think/303881/)

[3]:
[http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/](http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/)

~~~
tudorw
If you like that you might love this trip back in time from the one and only
Douglas Adams;

"Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time
when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he
chooses to digest."

[https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdams-
Hyperland](https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdams-Hyperland)

------
shortformblog
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/](https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-
encyclopedia/)), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to speak
up (I added some of his comments to the piece). There was a lot of back-room
wheeling and dealing around digital encyclopedias during that era, much of it
centered around Encarta—Microsoft acquired a lot of publishers during that
period and it effectively disrupted most of the rest out of existence.

But even considering that, Encarta was special. I think Microsoft had the
right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the
internet would only make it a temporary success story.

It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if,
for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on
the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The
nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the
market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was
unfortunate.

~~~
nickthegreek
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 his eyes.

~~~
echelon
> a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house

That's an alien relic of an anecdote as there ever was.

The world has profoundly changed in the last twenty five years. Cheap,
ubiquitous, networked computing has almost completely rewired society and
changed business, jobs, dating, friendship, travel.

I really wonder what the next big changes will be. Cheap satellites in orbit
and dramatically reduced LEO costs? Better battery tech? Advances in materials
science? Human cloning and genetic modification? What modern trappings of the
present time will feel used and dated in twenty years?

~~~
AJ007
In Encarta’s case, cheap, high density storage mediums were passed by
something that already existed and had existed for quite some time before, the
internet. In other regards maybe the storage medium was just a side detail and
the important part was what could be done with that data thanks to faster
computers.

There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal
Stephenson's quote about the future already being here but not being evenly
distributed seems appropriate.

~~~
dredmorbius
As Encarta was being developed (~1991 per another comment here), the Internet
was still highly nascent. I was at uni during this period, and a major
bragging right of the campus I was on was dedicated high-speed network
connections to other schools within the university system ... over 56K leased
lines. Those were shared amongst the 100k+ student, faculty, and staff
population (though a very small fraction of those used it).

The takeaways I get of this:

1\. Exponentially-developing technology can pass you by quickly. The Internet
went from _exceedingly_ obscure to global in the ten years of the 1990s.
Broadband wasn't ubiquitous by 1999, but it was increasingly available.

2\. Standards matter. Even constructing a workstation that could handle
_reading_ Encarta was a challenge, and the tools to compose, render, and
especially, present multimedia content (images, audio, video) were not common.
Microsoft went the closed-source proprietary route, dooming them to the
dustbin (though pieces were salvaged).

3\. Standards are hard. Re-read above.

4\. There are thresholds of utility that make or break things. I've been
around infotech long enough (somewhat pre-dating the periods discussed here)
that I've seen numerous technologies go from extreme cutting edge to widely
adopted to passe. (And quite a few proposed but never gaining critical mass.)
The reasons why any given tech fails _right now_ are numerous. Luck plays a
major role.

The present has exceptionally cheap bulk storage (my tablet has a 128GB
removable microSD card for about $50), high-speed, ubiquitous, and wireless
networking, and tools for sharding and distributing updated documents and file
formats (git, rysnc, etc.). This makes distributed updatable large-scale works
possible.

The technology of written works has undergone several seismic shifts, from
clay tablet to papayrus roll to codex to moveable type. Less well-known (but
only slightly) are the updatable formats: loose-leaf, three-ring, and
replaceable bindings, all introduced in the late 19th century, which enabled
updatable works. These were true "periodicals", where sections could be
updated with amendments or replacements as information changed.

The database, digital file, early version control, Wiki, and distributed
version control are, IMO, all legitimately novel forms of written works, which
should be recognised as such. They have and will continue to change how
content is created and used, and affects and interacts with society.

~~~
JimOk
I think the phase that usurped Ecarta's position had more to do with good
quality web search and to a lesser extent the crowdsourcing model of Wikipedia
(run by a foundation rather than a for profit mega corporation) than to
content or data standards.

~~~
JimOk
The arrival of good internet search along with the ever increasing pool of web
content doomed a curated content approach such as was used by Encarta (which
could never aspire to be as broad or deep as the web). I can tell you, based
on watching sales figures and talking to many customers, that web search was a
much bigger factor for the business than was Wikipedia. In any case it would
have been much trickier to get the level of crowd input given to Wikipedia by
a for profit enterprise. Regardless of tools or formats used.

~~~
JimOk
Hello trumpetsailor! My former colleagues have been pointing me to multiple
fun Encarta threads across social media.:-)

------
rchaud
I had Encarta '97 as an 11yo, purchased at a Malaysian street vendor market
for probably all of 3 bucks. It felt incredible to have that much knowledge
available for almost no money. And it wasn't just boring text like the paper
versions, there were videos too!

There was point in time where that truly felt like the future. Considering
that we're now in the age of autoplaying, monetized "content" video nearly
everywhere you go, it was nice to have only "primary source" video, aka stuff
like the moon landing, or the MLK speech, instead of some nobody warbling on
about its importance while splicing in stills of said video because they don't
want to be in violation of the copyright.

The concept of finite, structured and bounded content is also extremely
powerful in this era of overwhelming data, much of which rehashed and warmed
over by various publications not to mention utterly infested with ads.

The concept of spending hours down a Wikipedia rabbit hole is not new, and
it's one of the reasons I donate annually. But it first started with Encarta,
and it's offline-only format has grown to be only more valuable as time goes
on.

~~~
sanbor
Pretty much same experience but in Argentina. I got Encarta 97 or 98 for 5
pesos, 5 dollars at that time, when I was 11 years old. Later I read about a
Visual Basic course in a newspaper so I figured out that the way to build
software was using this Visual Basic software. So I went to the same place
where I bought Encarta and got Visual Basic 5, which was my first programming
language.

~~~
kragen
I'm guessing you were only able to access Encarta because copyright
enforcement wasn't strong here in Argentina? (Or was US$5 the Microsoft
official price?) What do you think about my comment on Kiwix and Wikipedia at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101)?

~~~
Daishiman
Software piracy wasn't on anyone's radar at the time.

~~~
kragen
Bill Gates wrote the "open letter to hobbyists" in 1976, when software
"piracy" wasn't even clearly illegal, because it wasn't clear that software
was copyrightable. We're talking about 1998, 22 years later. It had been on
Microsoft's radar since 1976. 1998 was in the heyday of the SPA and "Don't
copy that floppy!", as if sharing information were a morally suspect thing to
do.

The USTR Special 301 Report already existed in 1998 and already singled out
countries for possible trade sanctions for doing the kinds of things that
permitted the US to develop economically in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
I don't know if Argentina was already specifically targeted, though it was in
later years, especially due to _La Salada_ (Q.E.P.D.).

------
sureste
The thing about Encarta to me is that it felt so much more interactive than
what we have today.

Nowadays we read a Wikipedia article or watch a Youtube video on a topic but
never interact with the content. It's all very passive. I was a child during
the heyday of Encarta and I remember I had it and a few other specialized
encyclopedias (one about animals, one about sea life, one about dinosaurs!!)
and they were all interactive. I miss this about computers. Not all things
have to be a game or passive which is what I see nowadays when a child has a
screen in front of their face.

~~~
cpach
I never mess interactivity when browsing Wikipedia. I love that WP is text-
based, so that I can read it in my own preferred tempo. I rarely watch videos
since to me they always feel too slow compared to reading text. I understand
on an intellectual level that Youtube is a great platform that provide lots of
value and entertainment to lots of people, but I never feel that greatness
since it’s not something that I personally appreciate. Oh well, to each their
own :)

~~~
johannes1234321
There is value in "all" information being text. However there's also value in
having interactive elements. From the contextual fitting video to i.e. an
embedded star map: Imagine reading the article about a solar eclipse and being
able to navigate a 3D model of the stars. Imagine reading an article about the
human body and having a 3D model right next to it: If you click on "heart" in
the text it's being highlighted in the model.

Of course Encarta wasn't there, but we have 20 years of technological advance.
But for hobbyist Wikipedia authors that's too much work and for a commercial
Encarta Wikipedia is too strong.

~~~
kragen
How close was Encarta to that? I never used it.

~~~
johannes1234321
It had some simple interactive elements. Boring from today's perspective.
Exciting back then.

[https://www.oldpcgaming.net/wp-
content/gallery/encarta-97/Sn...](https://www.oldpcgaming.net/wp-
content/gallery/encarta-97/Snap105.jpg)

~~~
kragen
Can you describe the ones you most remember? I see the image but I'm more
interested in your (memory of your) subjective experience. What level of
creative freedom did you have in the interactivity?

~~~
therein
The most vivid memory I have of myself spending hours on Encarta as a child
was with their "flight simulator" / bird's eye view. I will try to find a
video of it but I am sure it will be disappointing in today's standards as
well.

Best example I could find:
[https://youtu.be/Dl36Ty2PqMU?t=1147](https://youtu.be/Dl36Ty2PqMU?t=1147)

~~~
kragen
Like Google Earth? I'll check that video out when I have more bandwidth,
thanks!

------
abhinavsharma
The period of time before the infiniteness of the internet but after CD-ROMs
could pack lots of information was fascinating to grow up in. You had lots of
curiosity but still limited access to information so you deeply explored
stuff.

Add to that, something like Encarta was curated by opinionated editors
(whether or not you agree with them is different from the fact that the nature
of content is different when it isn't trying to find consensus amongst
absolutely everyone) and did not survive based on advertising as most internet
content does today.

That set of factors made for a very different world of reading than today.

~~~
cortesoft
This makes me think about when I used to go to the MacWorld convention in San
Francisco as a kid in the early 90's. My mom would take me out of school every
year to go (just for the expo hall, we didn't have enough money to actually go
to the conference).

I was just overwhelmed by all the different software on offer, and would load
up my bag with free samples and spec sheets for software I had no legitimate
need for as a 10 year old, but I ate it all up. I would ride the BART home
after, just pouring over my loot and being so excited to try the demos at
home.

I went a few times after the internet took off, and it just wasn't the same.
Who needs demos from an expo hall, when you can just download everything?
There was nothing new to see at the hall, everything could be seen from your
home just by visiting a url.

I love the world with the internet, but there certainly has been something
lost.

~~~
lttlrck
Same for me with magazines. I’d read them cover to cover, even Computer
Shopper which was mostly ads! It gave great breadth of knowledge and it was
genuinely interesting because they had to be informative. I devoured them all.
I miss that.

~~~
ticmasta
those ads in computer shopper where how you learned what was coming into your
price bracket in the next 1-2 years. You saw an external 8x (!) speed CD
burner and knew you'd be able to afford one within ~18 months.

------
GordonS
I was going to submit this earlier today, but I thought "nah, nobody else on
HN is going to be old enough to remember Encarta" :)

I remember when our family first got Encarta, and I spent hour after hour
reading and marvelling about how all this information could be so easily
accessible! I think we had a 14k dial-up Internet connection at the time, and
the web was barely getting started - I really had no idea how things would
turn out!

~~~
vanderZwan
Are you kidding me? The only way hearing the opening screen again[0] could
evoke more warm fuzzy nostalgia with me is if at the end it would crossfade
into Baba Yetu from Civ IV's main menu screen[1].

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e0Qelqp-
Cc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e0Qelqp-Cc)

~~~
somebodythere
The MindMaze[1] music takes me back. I spent three-digits hours on that game
as a little kid.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT-
VbFcck6A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT-VbFcck6A)

~~~
jcranmer
It shouldn't be that hard to build MindMaze on top of Wikipedia. I wonder if
anyone's done it?

Although I do remember the hard geography questions very frequently just being
"What is the county seat of (insert random US county)?"

~~~
daturkel
Check out Wikimaze:
[http://wikimaze.appspot.com/](http://wikimaze.appspot.com/)

------
smacktoward
I would also add that I miss Microsoft Cinemania
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

~~~
tasogare
I have the one on musical instruments: [https://archive.org/details/microsoft-
musical-instruments](https://archive.org/details/microsoft-musical-
instruments). Spend hours in it even if I wasn't that interested by music.

~~~
smacktoward
I didn't even know that had existed! MS really did have a fascinating CD-ROM
portfolio back in the day.

------
ChuckMcM
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 don't result
in a click, it is because Google is getting better at 'one boxing' the answer
so you don't need to click through to read it.

[1] That project started by digitizing my referenced by less often used text
books. Which lead to me digitizing text books for others as well. After
Google's win on digitizing books is fair use for air cover much of the work
applies NLP and a bit of machine learning to pull out facts which are not, in
themselves copyrightable.

[2] "Google Wins Copyright Suit" \---
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2016/04/18...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2016/04/18/google-books-just-won-a-decade-long-copyright-
fight/?noredirect=on)

~~~
shortformblog
This sounds amazing. I know it’s a personal project, but you should seriously
share it with more people at some point.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The idea came from the fact that I wanted to play with the NLP work and wanted
more useful data sets to start from (parsing Shakespeare gets old :-). And the
fact that my fairly simple search engine for PDFs was basically just a classic
n-tuple index into the word clouds minus stop words and gave good recall (like
the old AltaVista) but not good precision.

Another comment in this thread about having a tablet to do that suggests an
interesting way to deploy something like this on inexpensive table hardware
with a somewhat more bespoke (aka performant) OS and application architecture
for appliance type operation. (think running a unikernel rather than a general
purpose kernel in order to not spend cycles on things you won't ever need)

------
Causality1
There was a certain method of presenting information that just doesn't seem to
exist anymore in the modern world. The by-design weaving together of text,
images, video, and audio when giving information about a certain topic. Sure,
wikipedia articles have one or two images, maybe an audio clip, and plenty of
links to other text articles, but nothing like an encyclopedia or other
informational software of the 90s. You'd have software about, say, dinosaurs,
and there'd be big diagrams where every word was a link to a descriptive
media. It feels like we've shrunk. You can watch a Youtube video but it's just
a video; you can't pause it on a picture of a T-Rex and click on its mouth to
learn about T-Rex teeth. The modern web forever has you finding any piece of
information you need starting from zero, and most of the time you can't summon
the energy to do that for everything you might find interesting.

Interactive multimedia is dead and I think today's children are worse off for
it.

~~~
mopsi
Video of the dino browsing experience:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgOZUPUGuwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgOZUPUGuwY)

~~~
Causality1
Exactly what I was thinking of, thank you.

------
hk__2
One thing that commercial encyclopedias like Encarta can have that Wikipedia
can’t is non-free content. Say you can buy the rights for 1000s of images from
some source; you can use them in your private encyclopedia, but Wikipedia’s
medias must be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and for this must be under a CC-
like license or in the public domain.

~~~
kragen
This is indeed an enormous problem, and a very significant reason we need to
shorten copyright terms. When copyright terms were retroactively lengthened
here in Argentina, we had to delete huge swaths of historical footage and
photography from Wikipedia. Into the memory hole!

Wikimedia Commons is more relaxed about licensing than Wikipedia is for text —
because most of the images on Wikipedia and allied projects are not and cannot
be created specifically for Wikipedia, we have to tolerate a wider spread of
licensing terms. However, the images _do_ need to be licensed for use on
Wikipedia, which is already a pretty permissive license.

See my comment at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101)
for more social context.

------
V-2
Here in Poland Encarta is probably best remembered for its ridiculous entry on
Poland, depicting it in a rather outdated manner, to put it mildly. It caused
quite an uproar back in the day, and went sort of viral.

See
[http://of19.internetdsl.pl/bzdury/encarta/](http://of19.internetdsl.pl/bzdury/encarta/)
(in Polish, but includes the screenshots in English, which are self-
explanatory)

~~~
asdf21
Seems about right.

~~~
V-2
Well, is not.

------
bluedino
When I was a kid, my grandmother brought home a cardboard box with a 4-5 mis-
matched volumes of encyclopedias in it. Always a bookworm, I could read an
article about any subject in them and be content for hours.

You can imagine my joy when, omewhere around 1991 or 1992, we got a new
computer in the library at school. It was a dedicated station for the
encyclopedia, and it was even set up in the same location as the printed ones
were.

My faded memory recalls it being Compton's Encyclopedia. It ran on an 286 IBM
PS/2 (the all-in-one unit), and it had a mouse, external CD-ROM, and a laser
printer. The rumor was that it cost $10,000. It wasn't fast, it probably took
closed to a minute to search for, and then retrieve an article.

~~~
TransAMrit
You're close! It was Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, which I started with
as well. When I later saw Encarta, I thought Compton's was a superior product.

------
leemailll
I miss it and I also miss a real encyclopedia collection. They both offer a
thing Wikipedia always lacks: consistency, in writing style, in topic depth,
in error rate. I still remember the weekend in 90s when I had a copy of
Encarta and threw the whole weekend to click through topics after topics, and
amazed at things it offered. It’s so much fun.

~~~
com2kid
Encyclopedia's are interesting.

They had to pick and choose what to go into depth on, but when they wanted to
go into depth, they would hire the best writers in the field to explain
everything _really_ well. Issac Asimov penned more than one encyclopedia
article, as did other science fiction authors.

I honestly learned most of my fundamental science knowledge from old 1950s and
1960s science fact books. Asimov in particular has multiple books that explain
science _really_ well, down to the level of nuclear fusion and fission,
biochemistry, and a lot of other subjects, and I had a few other books in the
same vein that were all really old, and really good.

I remember one book that was biographies of famous scientists, it went into
depth about Marie Curry and her contributions to science. Reading that ~age 10
certainly impacted my views on gender equality and helped me believe that
potential is not limited by gender.

Wikipedia, for all the great things about it, won't really do that. There
isn't a Wikipedia page I can point literally anyone[2] at and say "read this
and you'll understand the fundamentals of radiation and atomic physics".

I am sure such resources are out there on the web, but the odds of stumbling
upon those resources at random is less than the odds of coming across a good
science book at random in a thrift store.

That said there are some awesome YT science channels who have worked to fill
this gap in quite well, but video sources are different than written sources,
with each having their strength. (I read that short 10 or so page biography of
Marie Curry probably a half dozen times, not going to do that with a YT
video!)

[2] Where anyone is defined as "age 10 and up, with no mathematical
background, who wants to be entertained while they read."

~~~
tlb
I think if you start at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation)
you'll find everything you need. It's not all in a single linear article, but
that's mostly a strength of the Wikipedia style.

~~~
Loughla
That's the point, though. Having it curated and written by experts puts them
in control of what direction you go. Realistically, I could click through the
radiation article on wikipedia, and may be exposed to what I need to know, but
I also could just wander down a rabbit hole of useless information.

That's the entire point. I'm not the expert. Nor am I able to even understand
the basics of which direction to read/learn - that's what the expert curators
are for.

------
hugh4life
Wikipedia could do a better job integrating media.

I remember Encarta being pretty good about having video files showing the
outlines of wars and battles... at least for the Vietnam War which is what I
remember most. I prefer watching a video outline of wars and battles on
youtube rather than dig right into a wall of text on wikipedia.

~~~
situational87
I still remember using one of the earliest Encarta versions and seeing a tiny
postage stamp sized video animate and play some half broken wav file for the
first time. I remember it hitting me like a baseball bat: we can do VIDEOS on
computers now! This will change everything! TV is going to die because there
are no ads on computers!

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Those were more innocent times, to be fair.

~~~
situational87
I spent a good five years online browsing the web before they decided to start
adding advertising to everything. I never agreed to that switch in the
contract.

------
galonk
It's not reflected in OP's screenshot, but there was a period where Encarta
(and a companion product called Microsoft Bookshelf) used a very flat, Swiss-
design aesthetic that was catnip to graphic-designer-wanna-be kid me. You can
draw a direct line from that era through Microsoft's Neptune UI experiments
down to the Metro design language.

~~~
contextfree
Here's a talk by Bill Flora who was a lead designer for many of the products
along that line, from Encarta through to Windows Phone:
[https://vimeo.com/56764845](https://vimeo.com/56764845)

------
chc4
Odd anecdote, but my middle school had Encarta 2009 on all the computers and I
spent a lot of time going through the historical location free roams finding
bad geometry to glitch through walls.

I found out-of-bound clips in like 4 of them, and thought it was all very cool
seeing all the level geometry and non-clearing graphics smearing across the
screen. Probably contributed to my interest in computers and cybersecurity,
ironically, no matter how much my teachers said it was a waste of time...

------
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.

------
deckarep
I was just telling me wife a few weeks back about Microsoft Encarta. Turns out
she had a copy too back in the day.

My best memory is getting a copy shortly after CD-ROM drives were still new
territory. I loaded the disc and the first thing I searched for was either rap
or hip/hop. To my delight an audio clip played of Grandmaster Flash & The
Furious Five - The Message...keep in mind this was at a time when Multimedia
was new and the idea that CD-ROMs could hold enough data to make a richer
experience was ground-breaking!

------
grawprog
I used to love encarta. The thing I remember most though were the entries on
musical instruments from around the world. I remember being blown away by the
different types of instruments and used to spent lots of time just clicking
the interactive map and reading about them and listening to the different
clips they had. That was where I first learned about and heard the difference
between all the different types of bag pipes they have in different countries.
Up until then, I only knew about the Scottish ones.

~~~
dx7tnt
Holy moly I'd forgotten about that. Endless hours of clicking in the school
library.

------
octosphere
There's a few copies of Encarta lying around on Archive.org if anyone is
interested in getting a copy:

[https://archive.org/search.php?query=encarta&and[]=mediatype...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=encarta&and\[\]=mediatype%3A%22software%22)

------
chrstphrhrt
"Where do YOU want to go today?"

Will never forget the awesome splash screen with various historic photos and
the video clip with clouds(?), while/after it loaded content from the CD-ROM.

Edit: found it!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTOAHlGaDoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTOAHlGaDoo)

Edit 2: Okay the above was generic but I remember similar bits of it used for
Encarta.

------
MarcScott
I was lucky enough to grow up with a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica in my
house, that my Dad purchased in the early eighties. The set was amazing, and
an endless help when researching homework.

Then I encountered the BBC's Domesday Project
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project))
and was blown away by the quantity of information that was available on a
laser disk in my school library.

Then came Encarta, which similarly impressed, and now Wikipedia.

I can't even contemplate the quantity of information and in what form it will
take, when my son reaches my age, but I bet it would blow my contemporary
mind.

------
ergothus
I'm either old enough or out-of-touch enough that I never used Encarta.
Reading the comments here, I see a lot of mention of the interactive elements
and video.

I generally prefer text - it's easier to search, and faster to consume. But I
don't assume that my preferences are always best, so...

Why was Encarta so good? Why is it good enough that we should wish we had it
today? Is there some analog today that could let me "get it"? Because
currently I live in a world where more and more info is moving to podcasts and
videos and I hate it. Clearly I'm missing something, so help me out?

~~~
shortformblog
You have to remember that this was during an era when the internet was not as
common, so this was competing with physical books, not digital media. And the
result was much more immersive than reading a book, and the internet was not
yet mature enough to be an effective format for reading hypertext.

Additionally, consider that much the audience for it was people in grade
school. If you were in the seventh grade in 1995, you were the perfect age to
really engage with that kind of approach—which seemed awesome compared to a
boring textbook.

I think in many ways, our information consumption has gotten much more dense
over time. But in 1995, people would approach this like they would a nice,
long magazine article. Efficiency was not the goal: It was something that hit
all the senses.

------
Tokkemon
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.

~~~
pmyteh
There is an entire book on the creation of Explorapedia, _I sing the body
electronic: A year with Microsoft on the multimedia frontier_ by Fred Moody
(my copy is ISBN 0-340-64927-5). It's fascinating for its insights not only on
the messiness of the design process, but also the process and deadline
constraints that the team were working under (which feel like a general rather
than a specific set of lessons).

~~~
ravenpi
While I have heard good things about the book itself, it is tainted by the
fact that Moody was its author. The man literally and viscerally hated Linux,
and went to great lengths to paint it in as poor a light as he could -- and
then seemed surprised when people took issue with that. [Note that I neither
condone not participate in flaming, but the man's tone really necessitated
entire asbestos wardrobes.] I was neither surprised nor saddened when he and
his column parted ways.

~~~
pmyteh
Interesting. I haven't read his column, and that really isn't something I
would have guessed from the book. It's nuanced on Microsoft as a company and
pretty empathetic towards the people working on the project who are the
characters in his story.

------
oneplane
We never really used Encarta, and I don't really know anyone who ever did.
Right in the middle of the CD-ROMs are big and DSL just starting to become
available period we got a few educational CDs that did more specialised things
like only the history and current state of geographical information, or just
mathematics, or just historical events of one country. No full encyclopedia
was really digitally popular as the schools and libraries all had plenty of
physical copies and people around to help use/find them.

It probably didn't help that it was a Microsoft-only deal as most of the stuff
was an odd mix Netware-driven PC's without Optical drives (we had ZIP!) or
library computers that were locked in a box so you couldn't really put a CD in
them. And everything else was an Apple Mac, so you could put the CD in but you
got nothing out of it.

We did have something else, I don't remember the name of it, but it was like a
network-CD-drive-server device that worked on Windows 95, 98 and 2000, as well
as Macs, and we had a cross-platform (flash/shockwave based AFAIK) viewer
thing that was probably an encyclopaedia but it was never named or marketed as
such. It didn't have videos but it did have the same information as the paper
versions.

Most people who did end up owning (some version of) Encarta got a demo or
companion version with some other product, much like the Microsoft Works
package you sometimes got with systems, but right around that time Wikipedia
was already gaining popularity.

~~~
paulddraper
I used Encarta heavily in 6-8th grades.

Internet searches were of dubious quality, and libraries were inconvenient.

Encarta was the first stop for looking something up.

~~~
HeavenBanned
Anyone remember MindMaze? ...was amazing.

------
jdsnape
In the UK (at least) we had a similar CD encyclopaedia from Dorling Kindersley
which I used to use at the local Library before we had a computer. I
particularly remember the Space and the Universe one
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxEREP6LSLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxEREP6LSLw))
which I found totally amazing as a kid. You moved around different rooms, and
there were videos and the best mood music!

------
jancsika
> 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!
> For most of us, this was the first time we'd ever seen full-motion video on-
> demand on a computer in any sort of fidelity - and these are mostly 320x240
> or smaller videos!

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/](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

~~~
mopsi
> 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?

Encarta and Apollo in Real Time are not opposites, but the same: interactive
experiences.

In contrast, Wikipedia is very static. I don't recall ever seeing an
interactive visualization on Wikipedia like this animated and
highlighted/annotated jet engine:
[https://s2.smu.edu/propulsion/Pages/variations.htm](https://s2.smu.edu/propulsion/Pages/variations.htm)
It's much better at getting information across than text or static images, but
harder to put together in standardized text editors/languages like markup, so
somewhere along the way we lost the colorful interactive animations that
Encarta was known for.

~~~
jackvalentine
Those jet animations are really good.

I've found some math animations on wikipedia, some of which are good and some
of which are totally pointless:

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mathematical_ani...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mathematical_animations)

Certainly I'd love to see the wikimedia foundation fund animators to produce
explanatory diagrams and animations for more things!

------
RandomTisk
Encarta still has the best video/animation on Quantum physics I've seen:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnhqqISBSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnhqqISBSA)

~~~
athrun
Thank you for sharing this video! It certainly clicked for me.

------
teekert
I loved Encarta (it must have been 1997 or so?)! I must have watched that
double split experiment animation on quantum mechanics dozens of times! It
felt like looking the Universe into its soul... It may even have contributed
to me becoming a scientist.

Edit: Found the movie!:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnhqqISBSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQnhqqISBSA)

------
jpamata
I think I was 7 when I first got hold of it. It was installed on my Dad's work
laptop and since using it, I would beg him every week to leave his laptop at
home. Among my memories was spending time going over the virtual tours.
Encarta had this feature that allowed you to take either a 360 tour, or a full
immersive 3D virtual tour of a historical building. I remember my favourites
being the Abu Simbel and Persepolis tours. Another feature I miss were the
interactive quizzes (only available on Encarta Kids) and that creepy trivia
game. One of my past times as a kid was going home from school and studying
for these quizzes, reading dozens upon dozens of Encarta articles then later
trying my luck on beating my high score. A couple years later, we finally got
internet connection and the hobby died down. While the internet provided a
wider library of knowledge, it never gave me a platform to cultivate and test
my interest for devouring trivias as much as Encarta.

------
chicagofan98
What I remember most about Encarta is how impossible the "Mind Maze" game was
as a kid

~~~
theandrewbailey
If there was something like Mind Maze today, I might check it out.

------
atonse
Not Encarta but I remember a CD ROM we got about the San Diego Zoo with our
Packard Bell computer in 1994.

Boy, my brother and I learned too much about Aardvarks (because they were the
first item on the list).

~~~
daveslash
I had access to Encarta on my grandparents' computer when it came bundled with
their Windows 95 computer, but in my home I had Undersea Adventure, which came
bundled with our Win 3.1 machine. Man, I learned a lot about sharks and
nudibranchs.

------
fsiefken
There also was the Encyclopedia Brittanica, not sure how it compares to
Encarta. I remember getting it on DVD or CD and choosing it instead of
Encarta. No idea where it went. I'm not sure if the information is better or
more complete then an offline Wikipedia dump combined with the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

~~~
potta_coffee
Brittanica was the king of encyclopedias at that time, as far as I can
remember. I had a set of those, and I remember comparing and finding other
sets to be less good. I was pretty young but I spent a TON of time with them.
I don't have experience with the Brittanica CDs but my guess is the content
was of similar quality.

------
ryanmercer
"Alan, friend of Archer, defender of all Gorgonites, Keeper of Encarta..."

I remember when I first popped an Encarta 1995 CD into a computer and watched
an incredibly terrible clip of something (I believe it was the Hindenburg
blowing up). My mind was blown.

------
vturner
I don't remember Encarta but we had Sierra's Britannica and then later another
(can't recall the name). I remember reading the articles particularly the ones
on transistors and radio circuits as I was getting interested in electronics
with fondness. There is something there in the limited scope that developed a
persistence in me. If I was going to understand the transistor and build a toy
radio, I had to understand THAT article and the few others I might find in a
real encyclopedia around the house or maybe an article I got online. I wonder
how my children might develop such persistence with information availability
we now enjoy?

------
cptskippy
I remember in the late 80s and early 90s during the summers when it was too
hot to be outside, we'd sit in the den watching PBS with a World Book
Encyclopedia tome in our lap just flipping through the pages.

------
leoxvi
I am having fun developing an alternative interface for Wikipedia called
"Explore":

[https://wikischool.org/explore](https://wikischool.org/explore)

[https://wikischool.org/explore/Ludwig%20Wittgenstein?l=en&t=...](https://wikischool.org/explore/Ludwig%20Wittgenstein?l=en&t=dates&p=1&s=true)
(read an article chronologically)

The larger goal is to make self-study more effective and enjoyable. Desktop
browser recommended for now, as the mobile UX needs improvement.

~~~
bearbin
I had a short browse and I was really impressed by how much nicer to read you
have managed to make wikipedia. Normally I much prefer static HTML to whatever
mess the latest javascript framework manages to conjure up but what you've
done really seems to work.

The text actually fills the screen rather than just hiding in the gutter on
the left, and even though you've removed most styling cues around links and
actions, it's done in a way that it's still obvious what everything does, so
the main content can be clearer.

The dynamic sidebar table of contents is also particularly effective - on
desktop, everybody has a widescreen monitor now and it's disappointing now few
sites take advantage of it.

My only two critical points are your choice of typeface, which is awful and
significantly degrades the experience (browsing with fonts turned off is a
great improvement), and the speed - not only does clicking a link take several
seconds to do something but there isn't really any indication whether things
are happening or not.

~~~
leoxvi
Thanks for the feedback. There will be a "font-switch" option and I may need
to do some user testing for the best default font.

The speed issue is really a Wikipedia (and Archive.org) API fetching issue
plus some parsing time. I am planning to make the data fetching parallel, but
need to do some data-source-code refactoring first. A better loading
indication UI will also help.

------
mrev19
This is a really good book which documents the development process of Encarta.
Its a fantastic story. I found it so engrossing it inspired me to become a
developer. Its also a fascinating snapshot of a very interesting time in
Seattle's history, at the intersection of grunge and the nascent tech boom.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0788157930/ref=dbs_a_def_r...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0788157930/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i3)

------
aisengard
Many an evening was spent with clicking on Mindmaze

------
karthickshiva
The word Encarta brings back many nostalgic memories of me. Back in my
childhood, I found a folder of Encarta's files, where all the videos used in
articles was located. That folder contains thousands of videos. I edit those
videos using Windows Movie Maker, add some music and add titles and credits.
Then I will show my creation to my friends and guests come to my house. When
they praise, I feel myself like a big movie editor.

------
kccqzy
Encarta was one of the few pieces of software that I actually bought when I
was a kid. (Slightly embarrassed to admit that as a kid with no income and
parents not willing to buy software for me, piracy was a thing.) That was how
important it was to me. I felt a fantastic sense of wonder reading through it
and felt that I could really be a better person through all this knowledge on
my computer.

------
jumelles
I have dreams of Wikidata eventually being leveraged to enable similar
interactivity. Currently Wikidata can store plenty of information, but there's
no reason it shouldn't keep growing. Right now items already often have dates
and coordinates - creating interactive maps and timelines is theoretically
just a matter of implementation. Ideally, though, I want Wikidata to be so
much more: why shouldn't it contain historical weather data? TV listings?
Sports results? Having all of this available in an open and structured format
would make all sorts of things possible, and I think we're only scratching the
surface.

The other big "problem" with Wikipedia is copyright (and it's certainly not
Wikipedia's fault), but there's a surprising amount of public domain work
(thanks to many governments, especially the US) and of course tons of user-
submitted work that ranges from bad to incredible. Other language Wikipedias
can actually be more restrictive - there's no "fair use" on Japanese Wikipedia
so logos are often blurred.

------
sombremesa
Reading this thread makes it clear that there was (and perhaps still is) one
market where Encarta beat modern Wikipedia hands down - children.

~~~
leshokunin
That’s a perfect summary. So many apps for kids are just designed to sell them
entertainment as micro transactions. This was a useful and informative piece
of software, made accessible. I know Wikipedia has a simple mode, but it’s not
the same.

------
martin-adams
I was lucky to have Encarta at home when in school. I remember one kid
complaining that I did well in a homework assignment because I had Encarta and
the science teacher simply said he can't stop someone from using it to learn.

It's nice that knowledge has become widely accessible with the Internet. The
hard part I find now is knowing how to learn with so much access to
information.

------
taurath
I miss Compton 95 - it had PATRICK STEWART as the introduction narrator.

The multimedia was really really well done, and went a lot further than
Wikipedia in a lot of articles. Better editorial and emphasis for sure.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbP9jiWX08U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbP9jiWX08U)

------
whereistimbo
I never heard the full version of Sicuriada[0] as played in Encarta. It's not
available on digital or even CD[1], it's only available on cassette version,
which is not sold anymore and only available in libraries[2] which are far
away from me :(

[0] [https://youtu.be/deVyPq-AHfc?t=223](https://youtu.be/deVyPq-AHfc?t=223)
[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Music-Andes-Argentina-
Tahuantinsuyo/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Music-Andes-Argentina-
Tahuantinsuyo/dp/B000003IRT/) [2] [https://www.worldcat.org/title/music-of-
the-andes-and-argent...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/music-of-the-andes-
and-argentina/oclc/26524881)

------
yowlingcat
Although Wikipedia is without a doubt extremely impressive, I definitely do
have a very soft spot in my heart for Encarta. Much of it is nostalgic, but
the immediacy, content consistency and ability to use as an interactive
offline experience was fantastic. What a time capsule it is.

------
blueboo
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 VHS and LaserDisc. These days, kids watch SpaceX
landing reusable rockets live on their phones.

What was special was being able to freely browse it. Wikipedia crushes it in
every imaginable respect, from being more readable, to having more rich media.

It's fine to cherish your memories of Encarta...but kids have it better now
and experience the same things more richly. Sorry, dad!

~~~
smacktoward
_> 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.

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

------
Balgair
Mom cried.

She used to be a librarian. Then she was a geographer. The old school kind,
the one that actually drew actual maps. The librarian skills really came in
handy when drawing real maps. Everything _had_ to be right. People could get
lost in the wilderness and be using your map, or countries could be drawing
international borders based on your map, war could break out over your
mistakes. The printers and early dot-matrix printers put her whole department
out of business though. That was fine, my siblings and I came along about then
anyway.

I was too young to remember, but I think it was Encarta 95. I remember
standing there next to Mom as she fired up the new program, my sister sat on
her lap. She wasn't very tech savy, still isn't. We helped her out a bit with
the mouse and clicking into everything.

We looked up East Germany first thing. Mom wanted to make sure Encarta was
correct, right, true. We knew East Germany wasn't a thing anymore, even though
a lot of the maps in school and in our children's books were saying it still
was a thing. It took a while back then for things to percolate. Mom wanted to
make sure this thing was as up to date as possible.

She typed it in, it took us to an index page, Mom clicked on the top listing
(I think). We read a bit about East Germany. It had an end date. Mom was
happy. This resource will do for her family. Then there was a bit of text that
was underlined. Mom hovered over the underlined text. It said to click on the
underlined text to go to that page. My sister squirmed a bit.

Mom clicked and then the internet came crashing into our house like an
asteroid or an artillery shell or an earthquake; the floor was left behind.
_Everything_ changed in an instant.

It took us, automatically, to the linked page. I think I was about unified
Germany. But it did it instantly. Boom, there you were. Reading.

Mom cried.

It was at that moment that Mom understood. No more card catalogs. No more
having to hunt the shelves. No more having to look in the index for the page
numbers, jamming your fingers in the back while you flipped through the tome.
No more walking and sitting back down. No more having to ask strangers to
watch your bags while you went diving into the stacks. No more checked out
books you were looking for.

Just. Click. And. Read.

I asked her what was wrong. My sister was not happy with Mom crying. Mom was a
bit flabberghasted. She told me about all the effort that went into just
getting the information, all the time you lost, all the excitment that
drained. And how that was no more. How it was so easy to read and to learn,
now. The world was going to be so good for her children, for me, for my sister
and my other siblings.

Mom cried in joy.

~~~
dredmorbius
... and even in 1995, this was a 50-year-old dream, finally realised:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-
think/303881/)

------
ptest1
This harkens me back to the era of random publicity “multimedia” CD-ROMs. I
remember being /thrilled/ that I got a free CD-ROM from Toyota!

Before websites were really a thing, having your own multimedia CD-ROM to give
out was some kind of status symbol!

------
paxys
Nostalgia is a beautiful thing. Encarta was freaking magic back in the day,
but I'm certain that if I or Hanselman or anyone else were forced to use it
exclusively today they would throw the computer out of the window in
frustration.

------
axiomdata316
I remember the cool woosh sound the menus made in Encarta. I also loved the
interface that seemed to make it stand out from other Windows applications. I
opened up the dlls in Borland C++ to look at the artwork that made up Encarta!

------
dmix
I was always curious whether or not these other encyclopedias could function
as good sources for Wikipedia articles?

Personally I believe more universities should be publishing websites/wikis ala
Encyclopedias like this [1] that provide good foundation sourcing for their
particular fields of work and original content like video, graphics, and
photos (ideally creative commons, especially the ones with public funding).

1\. [https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-
life/invertebrates/cephalopods](https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-
life/invertebrates/cephalopods)

------
JorgeGT
The Encarta orbits demo was the Kerbal Space Program of my childhood:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy9R41Rord0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy9R41Rord0)

------
tjpnz
My first real computer when I was a kid came with Encarta and Dangerous
Creatures. I spent hours on those things and when I couldn't I would be
brainstorming what to look up next. I'm not sure what the equivalent of that
would be now, but it sure is upsetting to see what kids are using technology
for now - shitty YouTube videos with questionable visuals, mobile games with
predatory micro transactions and gambling mechanics, no doubt covertly
collecting data on them.

------
hackworks
During my undergrad (Mechanical) years (mid 90s), we had _1_ computer running
MS Windows 3.1 (IIRC). We had a demo version of Encarta and it had a huge (by
90s standard) collection of midi files.

I would enter the lab and start playing all files before starting work on my
project - Developing software for Finite Element Analysis. It was like an old
gramaphone playing the same tunes everyday and others in the lab hated me.

Since I would get in first, I had the right to start the player :-)

------
cftorres
I can't remember in which version of encarta, but when I was young I spent
hours on those 3D recreations of famous places travels. I live in a developing
country and the access for internet was too expensive, encarta was the best
alternative to do my homeworks, find cool images to print, and have a look of
the world. It would be great it could become free for the development of those
kids that still don't have access for good quality information.

------
Wowfunhappy
Does anyone know how easy it is to extract just the text / html out of an
Encarta CD/DVD? If it's easy, I'll go out and buy one right now.

For no particularly good reason, I have this urge to create a local txt or
basic html version of one of the major encyclopedias (something a bit more
concise than the full Wikipedia). I love the idea that I could keep a summary
of most human knowledge in a 400mb plain text file on my hard drive.

~~~
kragen
You should check out my comment at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101)
for a summary of the current state of some of the existing projects that do
some of this, but also check out the Wikipedia Vital Articles lists. Typical
"vital" articles are large, about 100K, so in 400MB you could manage about
4000 articles, which is most of the ones in the fourth-level Vital Articles
list.

------
nnq
Just saying... IF a team of experts would put time and effort into curating
and editing and adding in useful interactive vizualizations into a subset of
Wikipedia I'd care about I'd pay a hefty subscription for it!

Really, Encarta was freakin awesome... now we have a lot more information, but
nobody is curating, checking, validating and arranging it in nice and easy to
consume ways :(

------
bootlooped
I didn't have Encarta, I had the lite version, Microsoft Bookshelf. I recall
it being a major help on many junior high and maybe even high school homework
assignments. It had a dictionary, thesaurus and a mini encyclopedia! It was
decidedly less than Encarta, but it still inspired a sense of wonder and
amazement in at least one young person.

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

~~~
timwaagh
Never heard of it. Care to enlighten me?

~~~
cryptoz
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmudzYWY94)

------
penguinlinux
off topic: If you have a raspberry pi zero w and a large SD card you can
download kiwix an offline wikipedia reader that has a built in webserver. It
is amazing how you can download wikidedia full or subsets of it and have it
running out of a raspi w zero. I am working on a walkthrough on how to do it
so I will be posting an article soon.

~~~
dingaling
You don't need an RPi, kiwix is available for desktop OS as well as phones.

Why carry around another device instead of the computer in your pocket?

~~~
Menchon
Some people do not want to block that much storage on their phone, but usually
for Raspberry Pi the use case is that you can pretty much broadcast Wikipedia
within a classroom without the need for an install on each and every device
(it may also be kinda cool to have your own private Wikipedia network at home
so nobody knows you are browsing this or that topic - I know Stallman
mentioned using Kiwix once).

------
nocturnial
I know it's just a typo in the article but I really love the phrase "malware
invested version"

In a way, this phrasing also works.

------
chadlavi
Microsoft Encarta taught me a surprising amount of world history and culture.
Would never know what a balalaika is otherwise!

------
tr33house
Good memories: songs like "take me back to Jamaica where I belong" and "my
brothers do it best in my mother's TV"

Encarta was really one of the few ways I got to learn about the world before
we had internet in our home (this was around 05 when we were living in E
Africa). Thank you to everyone that made it happen

------
meerita
The problem with products like Encarta was bias and the speed of updating the
mistakes, misinformation, etc. I had Encarta, and Internet wasn't an option
back then, I had it in a CD. But today it would be nice to have some product
that competes with the vastness of Wikipedia.

~~~
jonknee
It competed against very expensive and bulky sets of books, so the update
speed was more than acceptable.

~~~
meerita
Indeed. It was the best option back then. I've attended a conf. of Jimmy Wales
and he mentioned the same problems that enciclopedias had.

------
Zenst
I remember Encarta for its pioneering use of fractal image compression
(whatever happened on that front), I recall reading a rather in depth article
in BYTE magazine prior to the Encarta usage and thought, wow, and yet, it's
one tech that seems to stagnated.

------
slac
Jake Knapp, a designer that started his career on Encarta, gave a huge nod to
the product journey in his Design Sprint talk in london a while back.

[https://vimeo.com/233941079](https://vimeo.com/233941079)

------
whereistimbo
I'm still not able to heard the full version of Sicuriada as played in
Encarta, the full version is only available in cassette version of Music of
the Andes and Argentina and can only be borrowed on library far away from me
:(.

------
wilsonrocks
I remember moving schools at age 12 and the computers in the library had
encarta. My friends had PCs with CDROMs and could print out Encarta for
homework where I was stuck copying stuff out from a paper encyclopedia.
Memories!

------
jve
In my 30ties, using PC since Windows 95 but FITST TIME ever I hear of this
software. Maybe because Games were more interesting. Or maybe because I barely
knew english.

But never ever did I hear anyone mentioning it.

Just thought I'll let you all know.

------
timwaagh
They could absolutely still sell this if they focused a bit on kids learning
and minigames. Maybe sell it on steam instead of dvds. Information is no
longer quite enough, but infotainment is still a huge market.

------
max23_
It was one of the first software I had when I got my first computer. To me it
was the internet and I spent hours reading all the entries and interacting
with the audio and video that come with it.

------
asimpletune
Encarta had a really cool intro song and animation that I just loved growing
up. Also, I vaguely remember kind of like some sort of maze mini-game, but I
can’t remember much about it

------
sawthinkar
Oh man, I still remember, my dad first showed me Encarta and he was quite
impressed with how it can still be used offline. One of the best moments I had
with my dad :')

------
nudpiedo
When I use google maps or google earth sometimes I still miss the encarta’s
globe rule to visually measure distances between two spots.

------
michaelvoz
Encarta had a time and place when I, as a child, had access to disks and
wikipedia did not exist yet. What is the point today? Vastly inferior in terms
of content by volume, controlled by a single corporation with black box
changes to articles (as opposed to Wikipedia's history tracking), impossible
to dynamically update after release... I could go on.

Edit: I absolutely cannot stand the smarmy "I wrote code that you use" on his
homepage. Sorry buddy, you probably don't.

------
imulligan
I remember Encarta because I too had those CDs. Wow. I completely forgot about
Encarta. Perhaps MS should update and distribute

------
inflatableDodo
_" Most folks at Microsoft don't realize that Encarta exists and is used TODAY
all over the developing world on disconnected or occasionally connected
computers. (Perhaps Microsoft could make the final version of Encarta
available for a free final download so that we might avoid downloading illegal
or malware infested versions?)"_

Give it to Wikipedia gratis, then they can make Encarta the Wikipedia entry
for Encarta.

------
Synaesthesia
I used Grolier’s and thought it was great.

------
6thaccount2
Encarta was awesome as a kid. I never knew it was Microsoft that made it. The
trivia game was creepy and fun.

------
anonytrary
I remember growing up with Encarta's 3D tours of historical sites. Those were
seriously awesome.

------
GSHF2J32nBpb
Oh! I have very fond memories of Encarta. I basically stopped playing video
games because of it.

------
LeoPanthera
I carry around an offline copy of Wikipedia on my phone using Kiwix, including
the pictures! It's amazing how much space it doesn't take up. It's quite
useful if you're often in places without cellular coverage.

[https://www.kiwix.org/en/](https://www.kiwix.org/en/)

------
kragen
Writing this from an occasionally-connected hand computer in the “developing
world”, _don 't use Encarta. Use Kiwix._ I have a 45000-article slice of the
English Wikipedia here in 6 GB, with nearly all the pictures, and even
animations and some video and audio, such as the radio broadcast of the
Hindenburg crash. To give you an idea of its breadth, articles I've consulted
recently include "anal sex", "rectum", "convolution", "ferret", "Dorothy
Parker", and "principal component analysis". (This probably paints an
unjustifiably interesting picture of my hobbies.) The whole English Wikipedia,
4 million articles, is 35 GB without pictures.

(Encarta was 32000 articles and, as pointed out in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741028),
ridiculously biased on some subjects, in precisely the way that Wikipedia
scrupulously avoids.)

The biggest problem I have with Kiwix is that, on Android, its built-in
downloader for ZIM files is flaky, and I haven't figured out how to load ZIM
files I downloaded in some other way yet, such as on a MicroSD card. The non-
Android version works fine with such sideloaded ZIM files. (I also miss the
interlanguage links; I have a few languages of Wikipedia on here, and even
when I don't it's often useful to find out things like the Guarani word for
"ferret". And of course I don't have a local Google Search.)

Kiwix also has ZIM files for things like Wikisource (7.2 GB for English),
Project Gutenberg (54GB for English), and Stack Overflow and other Stack
Exchange sites. The English Stack Overflow is 134 gigabytes.

As for the globe, a much better option than Encarta is OsmAnd~. My country is
under 0.6 GB, including most of the public transit routes, down to the bus-
stop level. Bonus: lat/long links in Kiwix open in OsmAnd~. Minus: OsmAnd~
doesn't have any way to load satellite imagery, even the Blue Marble MODIS
dataset.

Both Kiwix and OsmAnd~ are available on F-Droid, so you know they're not
malware.

But none of this is _interactivity_. Watch Alan Kay’s talks where he talks
about kids building dynamical models in Etoys to understand gravitational
acceleration. Much more interesting than the Wikipedia article on convolution
by itself: I have IPython, Numpy, and SciPy on my netbook, so I can create
signals and kernels, convolve them, and look at the results. I can compare my
own implementation of convolution to the library implementation. I can do
principal component analysis with the LAPACK functions for it. _That 's_
interactivity, and it's a far more powerful learning tool than mere hypertext.
And I don't have anything like it for Android. Is there anything?

An interesting thing to note about all of these — Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap,
IPython, and LAPACK — is that none of them are products of capitalism. They
coexist with capitalism, but they are all products of a non-capitalist form of
production, sometimes called "commons-based peer production", which evidently
outperforms capitalist production in certain areas just as capitalist
production outperformed feudal agriculture. The crucial question for the
future of humanity, I think, is how we can extend commons-based peer
production to new spheres, and the biggest obstacle seems to be artificial
scarcity produced by government-granted monopolies — patent, copyright, and so
on.

~~~
lstamour
While I appreciate the recommendations, the language/tone is a bit over the
top. Nobody’s seriously suggesting you should dump offline slices of Google
Maps, or Open Street Map (OsmAnd) in order to use an outdated virtual atlas.
It’s more like we’re reminiscing on how National Geographic (and others) used
to actually publish these very large world atlases, and how for it’s time, CD-
ROM-delivered encyclopedias for the world’s primary platform of the day
(Windows) were revolutionary.

~~~
kragen
Thank you! Censored.

The original article does indeed suggest that people like me are using Encarta
today rather than the things I suggested. I assume Scott is correct about
that, and I wanted to offer them some better alternatives than the profoundly
shitty proprietary experience offered by Encarta. I mean, what does Encarta
have to say about principal component analysis or anal sex?

~~~
lstamour
Right. Besides those topics (though maybe it would have them?), Encarta also
doesn’t have any facts of science or history beyond 2009 outside of whatever
web updates might have shipped, and yet I’d also point out that Wikipedia is
not considered a primary source, and writers of Wikipedia might have biases of
their own. Third-party sources written by editors, like Encarta and Britannica
would historically claim to be more trustworthy than Wikipedia, and this was
countered by Wikipedia saying they had more breadth and faster updates from
the community, with a wider set of viewpoints due to crowd input. Ultimately,
Encarta folded because they couldn’t compete with free online offerings. I’d
only suggest that... for health matters, or business ones, or well, any
research at all: you should follow links to primary sources and evaluate them;
you should do research with the rest of Google and private databases.
Wikipedia is for summaries and the rest of the internet provides the source
material. Encarta provided their own set of curated summaries with multimedia,
something Wikipedia as a series of textual articles has not historically
engaged in. So, there are definitely advantages to Wikipedia, but it doesn’t
entirely negate advantages of Encarta or having the rest of the web at your
fingertips. I sincerely hope unlimited high speed internet reaches everyone
ASAP, including via space satellites, if cheap enough to use...

~~~
lstamour
While searching for a list of topics in Encarta, I found a PC Mag article
recommending Encarta over other encyclopedias of the day - it really took me
back, I’d forgotten how I used to get all my software recommendations from
magazines -
[https://books.google.ca/books?id=6qzzglITYTYC&pg=PA158&lpg=P...](https://books.google.ca/books?id=6qzzglITYTYC&pg=PA158&lpg=PA158&dq=encarta+list+of+topics&source=bl&ots=tvVpMDwjHm&sig=ACfU3U0kgGFlzBDf3ggcBnxKmTewBYRE0w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizy6-enJDkAhXsmOAKHTzCAU8Q6AEwDnoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=encarta%20list%20of%20topics&f=false)

------
jpkeisala
Didn't Encarta try to close Wikipedia? Or do I remember wrong?

------
pbreit
Is any of the Encarta content available in public domain or other?

------
NeoBasilisk
The only thing I really remember was that MindMaze game.

------
agumonkey
Earliest mention and use of Macromedia Flash in my case.

------
IAmGraydon
Nostalgia can have some very strange effects.

------
ThomPete
Then build it. I’d donate.

------
rkimmel
I don’t miss Microsoft anything.

------
HNcantBtrustd
Encarta confused me as a young kid. It wasn't a video game, but I played it
like a video game.

I didn't understand what an encyclopedia was.

------
OrgNet
Looks like the latest Encarta is from 2009 ... I wonder if they would consider
releasing their copyrights to the public

------
groundlogic
Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty
much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world".
(I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who
have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web
access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17,
globally.)

That said, nostalgia is fun sometimes.

~~~
NikolaNovak
I'm sorry, this is just incorrect by somebody who either hadn't fully used
Encarta / Compton's, or doesn't remember them.

I have been looking for 5+ years for a tablet or PC "Atlas" which can easily,
with a click of button, show me graphs, or colour regions, based on specified
criteria such as political types; economy; climate; productivity; and other
interesting stats.

Wikipedia articles are horribly inconsistent about format and details they use
for different geographic regions. They are even worse at showing overviews,
especially across categories and regions. It takes me hours to gather info I'd
get in Encarta in a few clicks, at which point I give up. Google Maps doesn't
have any of these markings / mappings easily accessible; and neither is
trivially accessible offline.

This is not to say Google Maps and Wikipedia aren't _AWESOME_ \- because they
are; and I wouldn't dream of replacing them with Encarta for 99% of things.
But there are significant use cases which have been lost and not replaced with
anything of equal ease of use.

FWIW: I'd pay $50+ right now for a good off-line atlas. All I can find in app
stores when I search for "Atlas" is scans of maps :S

~~~
mey
You can download the CIA World Factbook, but it isn't an app, nor does search
work offline. It is basically a scrape of the site.

[https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/)

~~~
SanchoPanda
Interestingly,

2017 version: 170 mb

2018 version: 1.6gb

------
Maultasche
I know a lot of people here have fond memories of Encarta, but I found it to
be a disappointment. When my family first got a copy of it with a new computer
I was probably about 16 at the time (around 1994 I think) and I was excited to
explore it.

I found that it had only very basic information and didn't go into any detail.
I was very disappointed because I was expecting so much more information about
the topics I looked at and the multimedia elements just seemed to be there to
show off the technology rather than actually be useful. I put it away and
never looked at Encarta again. I know wonder if there was useful information
that I never found because I didn't spend enough time looking at it.

I also found many paper encyclopedias to be disappointing as well, and were
only useful for giving me a short summary when I knew absolutely nothing about
a topic. I really enjoyed the special Encyclopedia Britannica volumes with
more in-depth articles on a smaller number of topics. Those were much better
than the regular volumes with minimal information.

I think I wanted to learn so much more about the topics I was interested in,
and information was hard for me to find in those days. Only my local public
library had books the sufficient depth of knowledge to make me happy.

If I had known about the amazing skills of professional librarians back then,
I would have had a librarian help me find information. At the time, I just
thought that they were there to shelve books and check them out to people and
had little other skills.

