11 ms·

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 th

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.

bredren 7y ago
I saw the Hindenburg disaster video on Encarta, which was an intro to how articles and media could be put together. It amazed me at the time.
jbob2000 7y ago
With a little bit of investment, the Civilization game series could be leveraged to replace that feeling you got from Encarta.
dawnerd 7y ago
I actually just found an encarta 95 disk in a spindle of other random disks I had. Good memories from it.
echelon 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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.
  - dgritsko 7y ago
    I think the "not evenly distributed" quote is from William Gibson.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    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.
- avip 7y ago
  >I really wonder what the next big changes will be Temps up 2°C, marine ecosystems collapse, and hundreds of millions of refugees?
  - worik 7y ago
    Optimist
    - brainpool 7y ago
      Yah. People will just die. Refugee sort of implies a refuge. There’s not going to be such thing’s around if things go south as we fear they are likely to. It’s gonna play out far more like the Old Testament.
      - rusk 7y ago
        > There’s not going to be such thing’s around Heretofor uninhabitable places such as ... greenland maybe?
        k_sze 7y ago
        Is that why Trump wants to buy it?
        pyrale 7y ago
        Greenland barely has soil. Take a look at the bed of a former glacier, and count the trees.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        rusk 7y ago
        It depends on where you look. Glaciers pick up material for sure, but where they melt, it is all deposited as glacial till which provides nice heavy soil for agriculture. As Greenland thaws, all this stuff will be deposited upon it. Ireland for instance, and parts of the UK have been beneficiaries of this. Also, worth considering is that it is virgin territory for exploration for minerals and other goodies. No shortage of water either. But even all that aside, it is newly available space. If you can build a city in a desert (Phoenix, Arizona lets say) you can build one on Greenland.
- kragen 7y ago
  I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that people socialize more in the subway than they used to, now that they can send WhatsApp audio messages to their friends instead of reading a novel. But the grocery store half a block away still sells food in much the same way they did in 1994. Bigots still yell at me on the street to go back to my own country. Most of the workforce is still employed rather than gigging, financially independent, consulting, or riding the purple wage. International money transfers still take a significant percentage, unless you use Bitcoin, which most people still don't accept. Elections are still being won by polarizing populists who promise paradise and then pick your pockets; here in Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner even kept the records of her illegal wiretaps in paper form in the secret vault under her house, facilitating access to them against her will by the police. (And that didn't stop her from getting re-elected last week; her opponent also has a history of illegal wiretaps.) You'd think that universal access to all human knowledge would have remade society, but actually most of the humans don't really seem to care about knowledge. We got the Arab Spring, which turned into Daesh, the Syrian Civil War, and a new military dictatorship in Egypt. (And we got anti-vaxxers, global warming denialists, and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams.") Wikileaks didn't really move the needle on Obama's re-election. If cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing is rewiring the power structures of society, that's more because of Russian trolls and Twitter bots than anything else. Probably the changes you're talking about will come. But I'm not convinced that it's a revolution that cute girls on the bus give me their Instagram instead of their phone number. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741592 for my thoughts on other, more positive possibilities of modern informatics.)
  - riffraff 7y ago
    > International money transfers still take a significant percentage Some do, but I can get dollars from the US into most European currencies for less than .5%. We've come a long way from the '90s.
    - kragen 7y ago
      Oh, that's a good point — also it's a lot easier to convert Italian currency to French, German, or Dutch currency now, since they're all the same currency. I think that may be more a question of what the current political alignment is rather than the internet rewiring world society, though.
- alanh 7y ago
  My family was never one to spend a dollar if we could spend a nickel, so our encyclopedia was significantly out of date, as was our globe. But if you knew that the USSR didn’t really exist anymore, everything else was pretty much the same. Most knowledge doesn't become wrong; it just becomes history.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    My physics teacher once announced, "physics survives all regime changes", as he whipped out a stack of GDR-era textbooks.
- nly 7y ago
  Cashless and bankless society. I moved to London last year and have used cash roughly zero times since. Visiting my parents (outside London) is like jumping in to treacle. Finding coins for the bus? Paper tickets on the train? Give me a god damn break. Even using chip and pin is weird now since almost all my purchases, except for dining out, are either touchless, online, or via mobile app. In 20 years i think cash (banknotes, coinage), and maybe even bank accounts as we know them today, will be an almost alien concept to kids. Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade.
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    > Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade. Don't have a safety deposit box with precious metals and jewels inside? Many, many people do - among other items (guns, cash, drugs, etc). While "brick and mortar" banks may not exist, something of the same nature will - some kind of high-security place to store stuff like that, away from home. Maybe it will also be combined with some kind of networked backup storage for data as well... To an extent, places like this do exist - private vault companies; always have. I guess my point is that physical banks offer other services which can't be replicated virtually.
    - ajdlinux 7y ago
      I seem to recall reading an article on HN a few weeks ago about how banks are pulling out of the safety deposit business now that their new branches don't really need vaults for cash, and it's not clear that any replacement for those services is emerging with the same geographic reach as the retail banking system.
      - dnh44 7y ago
        Also the main point of the article was that the safety deposit boxes aren't even safe. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
    - 7y ago
pkaye 7y ago
My parents got us a full blown Encyclopedia Britannica book set in the 80s. Probably cost $1000 which was difficult by how much they made. But they paid it down monthly. I used to have loads of fun thumbing through those books. There were a few index books where you looked up a topic and it would refer you to a page in one of the other books. Closest thing to the internet back then.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I had a World Book and then an Encyclopedia Britannica growing up. They gave me many many hours of pleasure. (I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.) And, yes, I seem to recall the price was something in the $500-$1000 ballpark. Which was definitely a lot of money in the early 70s(?) when I got it--and, yes, the salesman came to the house.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    > I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that. Same here! The knowledge was obsolete but the memories of my childhood were a part of it. I eventually recycled most of them after I last moved but there are a few books I still have somewhere.
  - UncleSlacky 7y ago
    I inherited a 1952 World Book set from an older cousin, then part-exchanged it for a 1979 set (plus the 1980 "Year Book" update) thanks to the encyclopedia salesman. The normal price would have been around $1000 even then. Today they weigh down/stabilize one of my freestanding bookshelves in the living room.
  - 5555624 7y ago
    >I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that. A few years ago, during a move,I finally parted with the set my parents had gotten in the late 60s or early 70s. It was painful, but I had to really downsize at the time. I still have my 1911 edition, which I can't get rid of, even if I haven't cracked a volume in a couple of years.
markus_zhang 7y ago
Yeah it is THE software for multi-media showcase. Back in 90s I had a copy of shareware/demo version and it already blowed my mind off. The whole collection was like a dozen CD I think? I never got the chance to see it though. Nowadays we still don't have something that match up the experience.
goatinaboat 7y ago
the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information Same experience here. It was like having the computer from the Starship Enterprise but it was right here and now and I got to use it. It’s been a long time since I felt that sense of wonder from anything in computing.
helloguillecl 7y ago
Do you happen to remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A :)
jacobolus 7y ago
My grandparents got a Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia one volume at a time from a supermarket marketing thing in the 1950s. Amusingly, many of the articles in Encarta were copied verbatim from there.
- voltagex_ 7y ago
  Last part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls >"After failing to purchase rights to the text of the Encyclopædia Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia for its Encarta digital encyclopedia, Microsoft reluctantly used (under license) the text of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia for the first editions of its encyclopedia. This licensed text was gradually replaced over the following years with content Microsoft created itself.[7]"
JimOk 7y ago
A long time encyclopedia editor (who worked at Britannica, World Book, and Encarta) told me that door to door encyclopedia sales were dying well before Encarta. Due to the rise in two income couples, which radically narrowed the time window when you could get anyone to give you time at the door...

bredren 7y ago

I saw the Hindenburg disaster video on Encarta, which was an intro to how articles and media could be put together. It amazed me at the time.

jbob2000 7y ago

With a little bit of investment, the Civilization game series could be leveraged to replace that feeling you got from Encarta.

dawnerd 7y ago

I actually just found an encarta 95 disk in a spindle of other random disks I had. Good memories from it.

echelon 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
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.
- dgritsko 7y ago
  I think the "not evenly distributed" quote is from William Gibson.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  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.
avip 7y ago
>I really wonder what the next big changes will be Temps up 2°C, marine ecosystems collapse, and hundreds of millions of refugees?
- worik 7y ago
  Optimist
  - brainpool 7y ago
    Yah. People will just die. Refugee sort of implies a refuge. There’s not going to be such thing’s around if things go south as we fear they are likely to. It’s gonna play out far more like the Old Testament.
    - rusk 7y ago
      > There’s not going to be such thing’s around Heretofor uninhabitable places such as ... greenland maybe?
      - k_sze 7y ago
        Is that why Trump wants to buy it?
      - pyrale 7y ago
        Greenland barely has soil. Take a look at the bed of a former glacier, and count the trees.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        rusk 7y ago
        It depends on where you look. Glaciers pick up material for sure, but where they melt, it is all deposited as glacial till which provides nice heavy soil for agriculture. As Greenland thaws, all this stuff will be deposited upon it. Ireland for instance, and parts of the UK have been beneficiaries of this. Also, worth considering is that it is virgin territory for exploration for minerals and other goodies. No shortage of water either. But even all that aside, it is newly available space. If you can build a city in a desert (Phoenix, Arizona lets say) you can build one on Greenland.
kragen 7y ago
I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that people socialize more in the subway than they used to, now that they can send WhatsApp audio messages to their friends instead of reading a novel. But the grocery store half a block away still sells food in much the same way they did in 1994. Bigots still yell at me on the street to go back to my own country. Most of the workforce is still employed rather than gigging, financially independent, consulting, or riding the purple wage. International money transfers still take a significant percentage, unless you use Bitcoin, which most people still don't accept. Elections are still being won by polarizing populists who promise paradise and then pick your pockets; here in Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner even kept the records of her illegal wiretaps in paper form in the secret vault under her house, facilitating access to them against her will by the police. (And that didn't stop her from getting re-elected last week; her opponent also has a history of illegal wiretaps.) You'd think that universal access to all human knowledge would have remade society, but actually most of the humans don't really seem to care about knowledge. We got the Arab Spring, which turned into Daesh, the Syrian Civil War, and a new military dictatorship in Egypt. (And we got anti-vaxxers, global warming denialists, and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams.") Wikileaks didn't really move the needle on Obama's re-election. If cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing is rewiring the power structures of society, that's more because of Russian trolls and Twitter bots than anything else. Probably the changes you're talking about will come. But I'm not convinced that it's a revolution that cute girls on the bus give me their Instagram instead of their phone number. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741592 for my thoughts on other, more positive possibilities of modern informatics.)
- riffraff 7y ago
  > International money transfers still take a significant percentage Some do, but I can get dollars from the US into most European currencies for less than .5%. We've come a long way from the '90s.
  - kragen 7y ago
    Oh, that's a good point — also it's a lot easier to convert Italian currency to French, German, or Dutch currency now, since they're all the same currency. I think that may be more a question of what the current political alignment is rather than the internet rewiring world society, though.
alanh 7y ago
My family was never one to spend a dollar if we could spend a nickel, so our encyclopedia was significantly out of date, as was our globe. But if you knew that the USSR didn’t really exist anymore, everything else was pretty much the same. Most knowledge doesn't become wrong; it just becomes history.
- majewsky 7y ago
  My physics teacher once announced, "physics survives all regime changes", as he whipped out a stack of GDR-era textbooks.
nly 7y ago
Cashless and bankless society. I moved to London last year and have used cash roughly zero times since. Visiting my parents (outside London) is like jumping in to treacle. Finding coins for the bus? Paper tickets on the train? Give me a god damn break. Even using chip and pin is weird now since almost all my purchases, except for dining out, are either touchless, online, or via mobile app. In 20 years i think cash (banknotes, coinage), and maybe even bank accounts as we know them today, will be an almost alien concept to kids. Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade. Don't have a safety deposit box with precious metals and jewels inside? Many, many people do - among other items (guns, cash, drugs, etc). While "brick and mortar" banks may not exist, something of the same nature will - some kind of high-security place to store stuff like that, away from home. Maybe it will also be combined with some kind of networked backup storage for data as well... To an extent, places like this do exist - private vault companies; always have. I guess my point is that physical banks offer other services which can't be replicated virtually.
  - ajdlinux 7y ago
    I seem to recall reading an article on HN a few weeks ago about how banks are pulling out of the safety deposit business now that their new branches don't really need vaults for cash, and it's not clear that any replacement for those services is emerging with the same geographic reach as the retail banking system.
    - dnh44 7y ago
      Also the main point of the article was that the safety deposit boxes aren't even safe. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
  - 7y ago

pkaye 7y ago

My parents got us a full blown Encyclopedia Britannica book set in the 80s. Probably cost $1000 which was difficult by how much they made. But they paid it down monthly. I used to have loads of fun thumbing through those books. There were a few index books where you looked up a topic and it would refer you to a page in one of the other books. Closest thing to the internet back then.

ghaff 7y ago
I had a World Book and then an Encyclopedia Britannica growing up. They gave me many many hours of pleasure. (I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.) And, yes, I seem to recall the price was something in the $500-$1000 ballpark. Which was definitely a lot of money in the early 70s(?) when I got it--and, yes, the salesman came to the house.
- pkaye 7y ago
  > I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that. Same here! The knowledge was obsolete but the memories of my childhood were a part of it. I eventually recycled most of them after I last moved but there are a few books I still have somewhere.
- UncleSlacky 7y ago
  I inherited a 1952 World Book set from an older cousin, then part-exchanged it for a 1979 set (plus the 1980 "Year Book" update) thanks to the encyclopedia salesman. The normal price would have been around $1000 even then. Today they weigh down/stabilize one of my freestanding bookshelves in the living room.
- 5555624 7y ago
  >I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that. A few years ago, during a move,I finally parted with the set my parents had gotten in the late 60s or early 70s. It was painful, but I had to really downsize at the time. I still have my 1911 edition, which I can't get rid of, even if I haven't cracked a volume in a couple of years.

markus_zhang 7y ago

Yeah it is THE software for multi-media showcase. Back in 90s I had a copy of shareware/demo version and it already blowed my mind off. The whole collection was like a dozen CD I think? I never got the chance to see it though. Nowadays we still don't have something that match up the experience.

goatinaboat 7y ago

the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information Same experience here. It was like having the computer from the Starship Enterprise but it was right here and now and I got to use it. It’s been a long time since I felt that sense of wonder from anything in computing.

helloguillecl 7y ago

Do you happen to remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A :)

jacobolus 7y ago

My grandparents got a Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia one volume at a time from a supermarket marketing thing in the 1950s. Amusingly, many of the articles in Encarta were copied verbatim from there.

voltagex_ 7y ago
Last part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funk_%26_Wagnalls >"After failing to purchase rights to the text of the Encyclopædia Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia for its Encarta digital encyclopedia, Microsoft reluctantly used (under license) the text of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia for the first editions of its encyclopedia. This licensed text was gradually replaced over the following years with content Microsoft created itself.[7]"

JimOk 7y ago

A long time encyclopedia editor (who worked at Britannica, World Book, and Encarta) told me that door to door encyclopedia sales were dying well before Encarta. Due to the rise in two income couples, which radically narrowed the time window when you could get anyone to give you time at the door...