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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

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's a way superior experience and there's x100 content.

pm90 6y ago
A one stop shop is kinda nice. The quality of the content is really good too. Wikipedia is probably good enough for the most part though. I remember being so excited and enchanted by encarta and even non digital encyclopedias and books as a kid. The idea that I could crack open a volume and learn anything felt magical, in a non digitized world.
Minor49er 6y ago
Encarta was charged with multimedia. It was a really new and exciting experience for a kid growing up before Flash sites started really even became popular. Loading up Encarta, you'd get a musical intro with flashes of footage from shuttle launches, famous speeches, native American tribes, animals, etc. Then immediate after, you get a button called "Explore". Clicking that zooms you into a web of categories, with each one zooming further and further down into more fine-grained topics where you could get previews about what you were about to discover. The articles were concise and full of video or other interactive pieces. Certain topics would have a brief sound recording as an introduction. I even remember you could assemble a dinosaur to learn about the different parts. Every prominent UI interaction, from a button click to expanding a context menu, had a unique and satisfying sound. That would be a huge problem for most people with most UI today, but given that there was so much media being played, it fit in naturally. The interface itself was basically a web browser, so it helped to teach kids about simple concepts, like navigation, hyperlinks, bookmarks, internal vs external resources, and so on. It was a great pre-introduction to surfing the web. For a kid, I think Encarta would be a much more fun and engaging experience than Wikipedia when choosing an encyclopedia. If you want to see what Bill Gates envisioned for multimedia learning around the time, you should check out the (hilariously cheesy) videos that came with his book "The Road Ahead" And don't even get me started on how cool the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was at the time. (Am I really getting nostalgic over encyclopedias over here? ...)

pm90 6y ago

A one stop shop is kinda nice. The quality of the content is really good too. Wikipedia is probably good enough for the most part though. I remember being so excited and enchanted by encarta and even non digital encyclopedias and books as a kid. The idea that I could crack open a volume and learn anything felt magical, in a non digitized world.

Minor49er 6y ago

Encarta was charged with multimedia. It was a really new and exciting experience for a kid growing up before Flash sites started really even became popular. Loading up Encarta, you'd get a musical intro with flashes of footage from shuttle launches, famous speeches, native American tribes, animals, etc. Then immediate after, you get a button called "Explore". Clicking that zooms you into a web of categories, with each one zooming further and further down into more fine-grained topics where you could get previews about what you were about to discover. The articles were concise and full of video or other interactive pieces. Certain topics would have a brief sound recording as an introduction. I even remember you could assemble a dinosaur to learn about the different parts. Every prominent UI interaction, from a button click to expanding a context menu, had a unique and satisfying sound. That would be a huge problem for most people with most UI today, but given that there was so much media being played, it fit in naturally. The interface itself was basically a web browser, so it helped to teach kids about simple concepts, like navigation, hyperlinks, bookmarks, internal vs external resources, and so on. It was a great pre-introduction to surfing the web. For a kid, I think Encarta would be a much more fun and engaging experience than Wikipedia when choosing an encyclopedia. If you want to see what Bill Gates envisioned for multimedia learning around the time, you should check out the (hilariously cheesy) videos that came with his book "The Road Ahead" And don't even get me started on how cool the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was at the time. (Am I really getting nostalgic over encyclopedias over here? ...)