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

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.