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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)

426 点作者 IA21超过 4 年前

51 条评论

merricksb超过 4 年前
For those curious, here&#x27;s the discussion about this article from last year:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20739629" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20739629</a> (1198 points&#x2F;410 comments)
kar1181超过 4 年前
That whole period of the PC industry where &#x27;multimedia&#x27; became mainstream was pretty magical. I know the Amiga was well ahead of the PC ecosystem for a long time in capability but it never hit schools (at least where I grew up in South Australia) like PCs did. So with the emergence of VGA and Super VGA, widespread availability (and relative affordability) of 486 DX class PCs, Soundblasters and Optical Drives, the PC overran the other home computers.<p>Games and applications were evolving at break-neck speed and the pace of change really made you feel anything was possible. Encarta was really a product of that time.<p>If you were doing primary &#x2F; secondary school during the 90s, you&#x27;d have had to do projects where paper encyclopaedias were your primary resource. For me in a rural school it wasn&#x27;t until the mid 90s we had 486PCs with CDROM drives and going from Britannica to the searchable rich media database that was Encarta was a massive force multiplier. It was a remarkable demonstration of how positive an effect technology could have on the learning experience.
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rchaud超过 4 年前
I grabbed a copy of Encarta &#x27;97 at a street market in Kuala Lumpur for all of $3. I was 11 and it blew my mind how much info there was in it. Despite also buying FIFA &#x27;97 at shop, I looked forward to coming home from school and firing up a new article. They had a audio and video too!<p>It&#x27;s hard to explain just how incredible it was to have this info all in one place in the pre-internet age. Even today, I&#x27;d say having this kind of validated information as an integrated product offers a superior way to learn compared to Googling random articles and watching ad-ridden Youtube videos.<p>Maybe this is the 2020-itis talking, but I can&#x27;t imagine watching the moon landing or MLK&#x27;s speech online without mentally preparing myself for the rudeness and straight up lunacy in the comments section.
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leoxv超过 4 年前
Encarta (1993-2009) was a big inspiration to start the Conzept encyclopedia project. Still much more to do to reach the audio-visual wow-factor and sheer fun that Encarta had, especially for children.<p>Conzept is an attempt to create an encyclopedia for the 21st century. A modern topic-exploration tool based on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Open Library, GBIF and other information sources.<p>Please check it out here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;conze.pt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;conze.pt</a><p>There are also various screenshots of the feature progress on Twitter which give a sense of what is already possible: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;conzept__" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;conzept__</a><p>For the future I am also looking into adding some WebXR enhancements (such as eg. for more immersive image viewing) and some form of social meetups around topics.
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kenty超过 4 年前
Encarta was an amazing product that I fondly remember using in school. It was essentially wikipedia before there was wikipedia with the upside that it had curated and citable sources and generally a much higher quality of writing.<p>In my eyes, over the years, wikipedia has caught up a lot in terms of quality of writing and wikimedia now has a lot of images and video.<p>I wonder if there is a way to just download the whole wikipedia for easy distribution like encarta.
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asiachick超过 4 年前
I don&#x27;t know if miss Encarta but it does point out that in some ways Wikipedia feels like a step backward. Sure, wikipedia has more topics but where&#x27;s a video? Where&#x27;s the interactive explanations? Wikipedia feels like a 25yr old website. I know some people like that but it feels like a missed opportunity and stagnation to me
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scoutt超过 4 年前
I also remember the CD-ROM era (and before that). It was also the time when software just worked. There was no other way.<p>The content on those CDs was permanent. Software rarely needed an updated, it didn&#x27;t called home with telemetry and it didn&#x27;t needed a constant internet connection to work. There wasn&#x27;t subscription models for most of the software.<p>So you want to do some 3D renderings? Just install this CD with 3DStudio. It works.
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noisy_boy超过 4 年前
I spent a whole lot of time in my collage reading random articles from the hardbound volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. That was the first exposure I had to high-quality information about the world on an incredible variety of topics. It was such a great feeling sitting in a beautiful library surrounded by books in silence isolated from the chaotic and noisy world outside.<p>I get that now all information we can possibly want is at out fingertips, but there is something to be said about properly curated information in a defined boundary, in both physical and metaphorical sense, that you can focus on without getting distracted by the next random video.
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iqp超过 4 年前
My rural primary school got a Pentium PC with Encarta in 1996. It was placed in the library. I remember Encarta was on like 5 CDs, which the librarian kept under lock and key. You had to put your name down to book a 30 minute slot to use the PC, and take out the Encarta CDs on loan. It was a mission, and the whole time the librarian, a stern-faced woman in her mid 40s, would be standing behind you, arms folded, watching you warily lest you misused or damaged the sacred Encarta CDs. Fun times.
cx4life超过 4 年前
Encarta might have been one of my first experiences doinking around with computers - I remember replacing the .WAV file for a cheetah with the sound of a car&#x27;s engine and trying (but failing) to convince my brother it was the REAL sound of a cheetah. There is something about the data being bounded and explorable, both through the software and the file system that was... neat.
sleavey超过 4 年前
&gt; 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?<p>This is a great idea. If anyone at Microsoft reads this and agrees, please get whoever needs to know to know!
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martin_a超过 4 年前
I remember we had something like &quot;Encarta 98&quot; (was that a thing?) on my dads computer. It was a family computer and my brother and me were sitting in front of it, watching videos and reading all the stuff in there and whatnot. I always dreamed that school was like this. Hasn&#x27;t happened until today, which is sad.
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jkingsbery超过 4 年前
I spent a lot of time playing the maze game that came with Encarta, and like the author when I think of the &quot;I Have a Dream&quot; speech, I usually think about the version I watched on Encarta (as well as JFKs speech about going to the moon).<p>Just this morning at breakfast, my daughter said to me &quot;Did you know about goliath birdeating spiders?&quot; I told her that I did not, but I looked it up on wikipedia. I started telling them how wikipedia is a digital version of encyclopedias, which many of us used to have in our home, came in ~20 book sets and had articles about almost everything you could want to know about. My younger daughter&#x27;s response to the idea of having a 20 book set about all sorts of different topics was &quot;Why would you do that?&quot; Not only are things like Encarta and Encyclopedias foreign to kids growing up, the logic on why one would need something like that is lost on them. It&#x27;s not necessarily a bad thing (wikipedia is awesome in its own right), but it is interesting.
nsonha超过 4 年前
Yeah you had the whole world at your fingertips but it still felt achievable to consume all of it. Nowadays you have the whole world at your fingertips but you dont know where to even start.
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DoingIsLearning超过 4 年前
Just wanted to give an honorable mention to:<p>David Macaulay&#x27;s &quot;The way things work&quot; CD-ROM<p>So many fond memories.
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mcv超过 4 年前
I miss paper encyclopedias. A roommate had the complete 1974 Winkler Prins, and I loved to just browse through it. Admittedly, browsing through Wikipedia is also fun, but still, browsing through a paper book is a very different experience. My kids don&#x27;t see the point, unfortunately.
timdaub超过 4 年前
Ahhhh the memories. I remember that my dad had a Windows XP PC in his office and sometimes we kids were allowed to play with it.<p>There was this one funny feature in Encarta, that when you typed something about the moon, it would bring up a 3D simulation of the moon orbiting earth.<p>Annnd, you could influence the moon&#x27;s orbit with the mouse so that it ended up crashing into earth.<p>That was sooo fun!
monkeydust超过 4 年前
Man Encarta brings back memories. My parents got me the CD box set, putting into the drive, the anticipation and awe when it loaded and hours spent going through the quality content. Take it for granted how far along we have come.
CobrastanJorji超过 4 年前
I think an Encarta 95 video about a laser shooting back and forth between two mirrors on a spaceship is still my mental model for how to think about time dilation. Wikipedia&#x27;s wonderful, but the quality of the best multimedia content in Encarta was sky high in a way that&#x27;s hard to reproduce without a team of paid artists and educators.
jaimex2超过 4 年前
Ah the joys of hearing the CD stacker in the classroom spin away as it tried to serve a room of 30 kids content from a bunch of Encarta CDs shared over the network drives.
Yizahi超过 4 年前
Encarta was fun. Also I remember having some &quot;specialized&quot; encyclopedias on the CDs - about cats, about Formula-1 etc. It was very interesting to just look around random articles, like Scott says.<p>On the slightly related note - I&#x27;ve found recently that Wikipedia has several lists called Vital articles which compile the best and most essential articles. It feels a bit like those old encyclopedias. So I&#x27;ve decided to read through level 3 articles for fun, as a personal project.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Vital_articles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Vital_articles</a>
edandersen超过 4 年前
Mind Maze was a great excuse to play games at school!
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galapago超过 4 年前
Some scummvm developers are working to support the Director engine, which will allow Encarta to be &quot;played&quot; from scummvm.
ImaCake超过 4 年前
I downloaded a 3gb file today that contains information about the human genome. But it was just an accessory file that lists a bunch of variations within the genome - not even the genome itself! Amazing to think how many books would fit into those same 3gb and yet we casually use it up with routine science now.
mister_hn超过 4 年前
I remember when I&#x27;ve got the Encarta 1995 and I was light years ahead of my school friends when doing researches and gather material.<p>I guess an hypothetical Encarta 2020 would not even fit in 5&#x2F;6 Blue Rays, especially considering the better quality of images and videos
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Causality1超过 4 年前
&quot;Multimedia&quot; doesn&#x27;t really exist anymore in the polished way it used to. If you want to learn about, say, Lewis and Clark, you could look it up on Wikipedia where you can find some pictures and a few source links where you can track down more info. Or you could watch a video about it on YouTube. Twenty years ago you could buy a single CD that would interweave video, audio, text, pictures, and interactive elements into a cohesive whole that felt much more alive. Is today&#x27;s free information better than yesterday&#x27;s expensive information? Probably, but I&#x27;d still point to Microsoft Dinosaurs if I wanted to light a fire in the heart of a child.
7952超过 4 年前
I miss books. The kind of &quot;Encyclopedia of&quot; style that had pictures, text, diagrams, and maps that were all part of a whole. Written for a general audience of curious people and not needing to cater to such a wide audience as Wikipedia.
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agambrahma超过 4 年前
As someone who was fortunate to have a World Book encyclopaedia set, I think having a curated, &quot;this is everything&quot; experience is vastly under-rated.<p>Encarta was better because it had some multi-media (as opposed to &quot;just paper&quot;).<p>I remember being thrilled with Wikipedia when it came out, going down lots of rabbit holes, and marveling at all the up-to-date information, but a decade-and-half later, its downsides are also apparent to me: - easily leads to distraction - subject to its own kind of bias - harder to get &quot;big picture&quot; without some a priori mental framework<p>I am quietly happy that World Book is still around :-)
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bluedino超过 4 年前
The very first time I saw a CDROM was an encyclopedia, 1992 or so?<p>I believe it was Grolier&#x27;s or Compton&#x27;s. It ran on an IBM PS&#x2F;2 style system with an external CDROM that used drive caddies.<p>It took at least a minute to search for an article and then probably another minute to load the information up. I remember there being some black and white pictures with some articles as well, and there was even a laser printer to print your findings.<p>I remember parents saying it cost &quot;$10,000&quot;, but I also remember that we got it using Campbell&#x27;s soup labels and box tops that students turned in.
shannifin超过 4 年前
My family finally got a Windows PC in 1996, and Encarta was one of the first pieces of software we installed. I can&#x27;t claim that I miss it much, but at the time it was definitely magical.
inoffensivename超过 4 年前
I was awestruck by Microsoft Encarta when I got a copy back in around 1994 (I was 11 years old). I spent so long just browsing through the articles and listening to audio clips.
actuator超过 4 年前
I love Encarta. Growing up with limited access to internet, Encarta was the world of information for me. It used to be so fun going through random articles, finding some multimedia which explained stuff with animations like for Chernobyl accident, felt so amazing at that time. The quality of content was amazing.<p>Also, the games added such a new dimension to an encyclopedia where you wanted to learn more.<p>Encarta is definitely the best MS software product I have used, apart from maybe some games.
BiggsHoson超过 4 年前
I think of all the school kids in the Internet era that have been told, &quot;You cannot use Wikipedia&quot; as a research source. Did teachers ever say that about Encarta?
atorodius超过 4 年前
I remember going through some 3D model of the colloseum in it, always thinking it’s maybe actually a game but it was just a static 3D model. Must have spent hours there.
vkaku超过 4 年前
I don&#x27;t know if people noticed, but: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;search.php?query=Encarta+2009" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;search.php?query=Encarta+2009</a> gives you links to try it out.<p>I loved Encarta, was so much more interactive and great for children to learn from, without getting mixed up with Wikipedia&#x27;s problems with political and biased edits and such. I really wish they brought this back.
120photo超过 4 年前
Now any ding dong on the web can present their information as if they are experts and it gets mixed in with legit info.
gosukiwi超过 4 年前
Before Internet and Wikipedia was a thing (at least in Argentina), there was Encarta. It helped me through many of my school projects :)<p>I have fond memories of it. Great piece of software. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s needed in the modern world though, but who knows. Maybe in countries where internet is still not accessible.
tibbydudeza超过 4 年前
I fondly remember buying the Creative Blaster MultiMedia kit (soundcard with CDROM drive) - it came only two CD&#x27;s - MS Encarta and the 7th Guest.<p>Nowadays cellular providers zero-rate data for wikipedia and other educational websites so at least every kid with access to a smartphone can access.
ignoranceprior超过 4 年前
I never had Encarta, but I grew up with a digital version of World Book Encyclopedia, bundled with my family&#x27;s ancient iMac G4, and it gave me similar feelings to what this article describes.
Foobar8568超过 4 年前
I must be one of the few who miss paper encyclopedia, mourn Encyclopædia Universalis (French version of the Britannica) and &quot;Tout l&#x27;Univers&quot;.
robertlagrant超过 4 年前
Somehow, Scott Hanselman&#x27;s blog theme looks as though it was designed by the person who made Encarta&#x27;s desktop icon.
shireboy超过 4 年前
My earliest memories of this was seeing the Hindenberg video over and over again in department store demos. Oh the humanity!
mevorah超过 4 年前
I have similar sentiment - I’ve had a side project on the back burner that adds an encarta 2003 skin to Wikipedia
secondcoming超过 4 年前
Encarta was the main reason I managed to convince my mother to get a loan to buy our first PC. Look at me now, ma!
skocznymroczny超过 4 年前
While we&#x27;re at it, a remaster of Pandora&#x27;s Box with high-res graphics would be nice too.
Riverheart超过 4 年前
I miss Dangerous Creatures, World of Flight and Explorapedia.
cute_boi超过 4 年前
i still remember using encarta. I used it more than wikipedia on those days :D It worked so nice offline . Miss those days :(
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Synaesthesia超过 4 年前
Groliers anybody?
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29athrowaway超过 4 年前
&quot;Compton&#x27;s Interactive Encyclopedia&quot; was like Encarta but it featured Sir Patrick Stewart, therefore it was a cooler experience.
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TLightful超过 4 年前
Remembering those huge, plate-sized CD roms fondly. Laser Discs.
meerita超过 4 年前
Convenience replaces nostalgia: Why miss Encarta when you have Wikipedia? I liked the Encarta experience: it was amazing to see videos, photos and everything in a nice UI back then, but today we have Wikipedia, Wikimedia, etc. It&#x27;s a way superior experience and there&#x27;s x100 content.
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