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.
I've had a similar Encarta experience as you and the GP.
Even the VB5 bit is identical. Bought a 2-3$ Encarta copy from a random guy in a random store selling pirated CDs. I remember the guy sitting in his small shop, downloading stuff over Torrent and burning them to CDs. He had a machine with the most CD-writers I had ever seen in my life.
I loved flying over terrains in Encarta's terrain explorer (or whatever it was called, I didn't really understand English back then, perhaps even learned it through Visual Studio and Encarta). Whenever I was bored and kids do get bored often, I would get on Encarta, especially since Wikipedia wasn't a thing back then.
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?
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.).
