4 ms·
This takes me back, and points out something people today probably don't fully appreciate. In 1993, Edutainment was the promise of computers. We had an old XT
by rconti 8y ago
This takes me back, and points out something people today probably don't fully appreciate.
In 1993, Edutainment was the promise of computers. We had an old XT that my sister took to college that fall, and we were shopping for a 486. Encarta and National Geographic CD-ROM based titles were everywhere. Every demo in every computer store let you play with these seemingly-limitless repositories of information. It was mind-blowing -- complete with short postage stamp videos for select subjects!
It would be fascinating to look back at all of the titles available, but rich multimedia was finally here, and it died as quickly as it had arrived, as people moved to AOL, CompuServe, and the Internet instead.
- cpitman 8y agoI sunk a ton of time into Encarta as a kid. In some ways, it still seems superior to Wikipedia.
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y agoI remember replaying that cheetah video, Neil Armstrong’s “one small step...” and that gravity interactive countless times
- asd 8y agoI think these may be the two videos you are referring to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEH-HxLJtBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEH-HxLJtBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4t2g37DAcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4t2g37DAcQ
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoBasketball too :)
- chrisfinazzo 8y agoMindmaze. That's all I have to say.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoIs there anything like that today?
- chrisfinazzo 8y agoNot that I know of. The demise of CD-ROM as a format and later the .com bust probably had a fair bit to do with the education software market getting reshaped in weird ways. I was a freshman in HS in '01 so at that point I was far enough away from that kind of stuff that I never really found out how it ended up.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoSimilar story for me. My school didn't have anything like a geography class, but my wandering around Encarta 95 was probably a suitable replacement.
- untog 8y agoI spent so many hours on that. I remember a later version of Encarta absolutely nerfing it though, and I have no idea why.
- smacktoward 8y agoMicrosoft's CD-based movie encyclopedia product, Cinemania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cinemania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cinemania), was similarly excellent. In terms of presentation, Cinemania 97 was far superior to IMDB as it is 20 years later.
- chrisfinazzo 8y agoSeeing Alec Guinness (as Ben Kenobi) get cut down by David Prowse in a little 320x240 window :) Man, those were the days...
- Keyframe 8y agoI completely forgot about that, you brought some great memories! It really seems like those curated educational/reference/edutainment(?) products were, in some ways, better than interwebz we have today. Microsoft was really good at that game. Even on the internet. I wonder what they're up to now, will have to check out. There was this site they did, I think as a part of demonstration of terraserver, where they made an online sky map with deep zoom functionality. It was impressive at the time. Googling turns out nothing - maybe I should try with Bing. However, english wikipedia is probably one of the most important, if not THE most important invention internet has brought us. Such a wealth of information and all as a free access. I've dreamt of such thing in our future back then, and now we have it.
- VectorLock 8y agoJust seeing the word 'Encarta' which I probably haven't thought about or encountered in the past decade is just bringing back a flood of nostalgia.
- chrisfinazzo 8y agoEncarta, Carmen Sandiego, Kids Typing, and Gizmos & Gadgets. It was the perfect confluence of events - I spent hours of time on these and might have actually learned something.
- MBCook 8y agoThe first time I ever saw the Hidebburg footage was from a postage stamp sized video on a CD encyclopedia (not Encarta) that came with our CD drive.
- kalleboo 8y agoSame here. For my family it was the copy of Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia that came bundled with our Mac Performa.
- pjc50 8y agoEdutainment was always a critical part of the sales pitch from children to their parents trying to get a computer to play games on.
- agumonkey 8y agoOnly Microsoft product I bought from a shelf was Encarta 97. It was ok, but the main thing I remember from that is 1) some beatles thumbnails videos 2) macromedia flash based
- BigChiefSmokem 8y agoMultimedia - now there's a word I haven't heard in so long :)