4 ms·
I remember being utterly astonished at the realistic music and sound effects in (what I assume was) the original "Carmen Sandiego" video game. I would repeatedl
by xamuel 7y ago
I remember being utterly astonished at the realistic music and sound effects in (what I assume was) the original "Carmen Sandiego" video game. I would repeatedly exit and relaunch the game just to listen to the intro song.
When the local library got VGA monitors, us kids would look at the digital encyclopedia and those VGA pictures were like the future. Some encyclopedia pages even had VGA quality movie recordings... it was like the dawning of the future.
- zeta0134 7y agoI got into some super serious trouble as a kid in elementary school for turning on the computer while a substitute teacher was there, and messing around with the built in encyclopedia. Even before we had reliable internet, it was amazing to me that there was this just wealth of information on this tiny little CD-ROM. I wonder if that sense of wonder is lost in the modern world? It's such a joy to stumble on some fascinating new relic and descend however briefly into the depths of its madness. I hope we can still find new ways to inspire that joy now that most of the world's information is available through a device in your pocket. Which... looking back on the last two decades is kindof an astonishing leap.
- zozbot234 7y agoThere were "digital" encyclopedias before Wikipedia? Using VGA graphics and tiny little CD-ROMs (700MB each IIRC, no double-layer tricks or anything) even? That's amazing.
- linguae 7y agoYes. In the 1990s and 2000s Microsoft sold encyclopedia software called Encarta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta I remember some consumer PCs being bundled with Encarta in the 1990s and 2000s. I also remember Grolier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grolier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grolier) publishing CD-ROM encyclopedias in the 1990s.
- roywiggins 7y agoThis Facebook bot posts an Encarta95 entry every so often https://m.facebook.com/encarta95postbot https://m.facebook.com/encarta95postbot
- glandium 7y agoThe Internet Archive has copies of Encarta: https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Encarta%22 https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Encarta%22
- roywiggins 7y agoReach back a little further and you'll find this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project Anyway, VGA graphics just means you don't need to store megabyte sized images since you can't display them anyway. 700MB is quite a lot if you're just trying to replace a paper encyclopedia.
- core-questions 7y agoGetting in trouble for looking around on the computer is also a memory I have from certain elementary school teachers. They must have been so paranoid that a kid would wreck the machine by touching it wrong... such expensive things, so hard to fix by their standards. Luckily, not every teacher thought that way.