6 ms·

The History of Microsoft Encarta

145 points by rcarmo 3y ago

Synaesthesia 3y ago
Prior to Encarta there was Grolier’s encyclopedia.
- pixelesque 3y ago
  Indeed, as the article mentions - but the UI for that was pretty bad IMO... The Software Toolworks Multimedia Encyclopedia was better IMO (at least in terms of UI and multimedia), and then from 1995 onwards, Encarta was generally better (again IMO)...
jeremycarter 3y ago
I remember The Hutchinson Educational Encylopedia on CD ROM. https://archive.org/details/the_hutchinson_educational_encylopedia https://archive.org/details/the_hutchinson_educational_encyl...
bknight1983 3y ago
My sister and I used to play Mindmaze for hours during the summer in the 90s. Encarta was such a great resource at the time.
conzept 3y ago
Encarta was a big inspiration for my Conzept project (https://conze.pt https://conze.pt) - a topic exploration system based on Wikipedia, Wikidata and other (pluggable) datasources. See many usage examples here: https://twitter.com/conzept__ https://twitter.com/conzept__
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Does it pick a random topic for each visitor? Mine was 2 Girls 1 Cup o_O
glimshe 3y ago
We sometimes forget how fortunate we are to have so much information at our fingertips. Even the richest person in the world would have a hard time having enough books to compare to, let's say, Wikipedia.
agumonkey 3y ago
Interesting comment about how pre-wikipedia encyclopedias were more engaging. I felt this with encarta, and old printed volumes. It's written by someone, or told in a different way. While wikipedia feels more like a text book reference.
- theFco 3y ago
  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[1], while restricted in scope, takes the approach of having experts write the articles that are then revised and evolve with time. So a different approach is possible, but I think it would be hard for an encyclopedia with the breadth of wikipedia to do it. Maybe there is space for more specialised encyclopedias that take the approach of articles having authors and revisions instead of wikis. But all in all, I think both approaches compliment eachother. [1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/ https://plato.stanford.edu/
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    Scholarpedia[1] also exists, but is very sparse and mostly a specialist reference. [1] https://scholarpedia.org/ https://scholarpedia.org/
- rchaud 3y ago
  Wikipedia is amazing, all things considered. But it's true that Encarta was a more integrated experience, with plenty of licensed images and video. Wiki is open source, so it's limited by having access to CC-NA licensed assets only. It's also firmly an "Internet-first" encyclopedia so it's beauty comes from its SEO-friendly information architecture and internal link structure . I'd bet it's easier for someone to find specific info on Wiki quickly, whereas Encarta would be better as a slow browsing experience.
HeckFeck 3y ago
My favourite trivia for Encarta is that it was built using a rich text view + a custom hypertext system, similar to the old Windows Help format before it all became HTML and IE views.
- Narishma 3y ago
  As the article states, later versions of Encarta switched to web tech.
masfoobar 3y ago
Think we had Encarta '95 or abouts. I think it was a good tool. Had to uninstall it a number of times when hard drive space was low. I remember using it for homework like History. I was luckly it provided a sentence or two. Not enough to really learn something. Perhaps Encarta '98 onwards were much, much better. Today, we have Wikipedia, google search/maps, assitance like Alexa and, now ChatGPT. Imagine the next 20 years.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  ChatGPT will happily imagine all sorts of made up facts for you. It's not really a great reference.
  - masfoobar 3y ago
    I am mostly referring to the evolution side of these tools, generally speaking
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
People want me to believe that Microsoft is "new," when people like Phil Spencer have been there since the start, and worked up to things like being the head of Xbox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spencer_(business_executive) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spencer_(business_executi...
qwerty456127 3y ago
Are any peoprietary digital encyclopedias available nowadays? I love Wikipedia and am glad we have it for free but I also know non-free encyclopedias can happen to be much better in some specific ways.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  That would be _Encyclopædia Britannica_ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Encyclopaedia-Britannica-English-language-reference-work https://www.britannica.com/topic/Encyclopaedia-Britannica-En... Also, _World Book_ is still in print: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/06/rejoice-its-2023-and-you-can-still-buy-a-22-volume-paper-encyclopedia/ https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/06/rejoice-its-2023-and...
  - gosub100 3y ago
    I wonder if Wikipedia articles ever cite paid encyclopedias as sources? It's kind of a conundrum: many people who don't trust wikipedia would regard paid products as more "legitimate", but Britannica would presumably not want to be cited because that implicitly helps a free competitor.
    - WillAdams 3y ago
      Wikipedia started out as a copy of a public domain edition of EB. Since then, lots of folks have edited and contributed content. It was a pretty open secret that when Funk & Wagnalls (where Encarta got its content) was first starting that they would pay college students to write articles, the college students would crib from EB or some other similar source, and then submit that.
botanical 3y ago
My parents bought me multiple editions of Encarta in my childhood and I absolutely loved it as we didn't have internet at that time. It was much more than an encyclopaedia; you could explore ancient sites and play educational games. It was great fun. As great a free resource as Wikipedia is, each article's quality relies on a knowledgable contributor to really make it worthwhile, and those are few and far between. Wikipedia is dry and lacks what Encarta had
weinzierl 3y ago
The beauty of Encarta and its printed predecessors is that they are unalterable snapshots of the knowledge and views of their time. I inherited an encyclopedia from the 1930s and it is a constant source of surprise and wonder to me - both in what is different from today and in what I expect to be different but is not. I think Encarta is the last of this generation. Sure, I can download a snapshot from Wikipedia and I did and others did and do as well. It's still not the same, because all our snapshots are different. Anything surprising in there could just be fluke, an editing error, the temporary state of an edit war. A Wikipedia snapshot proves nothing. My 30s encyclopedia on the other hand is a stable reference. If I doubted anything in my copy I could easily find another antiquated copy and compare. Same with Encarta, there are so many copies out there that this particular snapshot of human knowledge will never die.
- stakhanov 3y ago
  This is a bit off-topic, but how do you actually browse a Wikipedia snapshot? I tried turning a dump [1] into a browseable website hosted locally a few years back, and it seemed anything but trivial. Has any progress been made here? [1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
  - mvdwoord 3y ago
    Perhaps with something like Kiwix? I have used it for offline Wikipedia during prolonged travel... https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page
    - weinzierl 3y ago
      Seconded. It's a couple of years and there could be something better now, but I also used Kiwix. It's not perfect, but it works.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - solardev 3y ago
xacky 3y ago
I remember the period where Encarta allowed user contributions to their website but more moderated than Wikipedia. It's a shame that Microsoft gave up on Encarta too soon, it could have been a perfect integration with Bing AI and not subject to the vandalism and notability wars that Wikipedia suffers from.
SantiagoElf 3y ago
The startup sound of Encarta Virtual Globe 98[0] brings me such fond memories :) [0] - https://youtu.be/eNQ5yFlKhls?t=262 https://youtu.be/eNQ5yFlKhls?t=262
bjourne 3y ago
We had Encarta in the library at my school when I was 12. Having previously only used C64 and Amiga it was my first stint with PCs. If you needed to research something for homework say the solar system you would kindly ask the librarian for an Encarta CD-ROM and she would allocate a 45-minute slot at the library's PC.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wayne 3y ago
I interned on Encarta one summer shortly before the fall, and 11 years ago I wrote a Quora answer about why I think it failed, which amusingly still gets upvotes: https://qr.ae/pK2pGA https://qr.ae/pK2pGA
macintux 3y ago
Not mentioned: Microsoft Instruments, a wonderful way to experience music snippets from instruments around the world, which was killed via absorption into Encarta. (I never owned Windows, so I never played with Encarta; it's possible the same experience was achievable, but I like dedicated software to play with when there's no real advantage to integrating it into a larger ecosystem.)
nolamark 3y ago
Should you want to dig deeper, and see view from the other side of the battle. (posted with distant taste of sour grapes in my mouth, aka, I played for the EB side) https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Reference%20Wars%20-%20Greenstein_6c4ac193-51eb-4758-a5a6-a4c412261411.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Reference%20... https://web.archive.org/web/20031026131928/http://www.howtoknow.com/BOL1 https://web.archive.org/web/20031026131928/http://www.howtok...
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Article author here, thank you so much for posting this! I truly appreciate it :-)
wicket 3y ago
It's understated the impact that Encarta had on Microsoft dominance in the home computer market. Encarta came about at a time when internet access was not yet commonplace and "multimedia" PCs were next big thing. Amiga, Atari and Apple had CD-ROM drives but only the PC had Encarta. It was revolutionary for 90s teens with homework assignments. These days some might use the term "killer app" to describe it. Obviously there were many other factors that led to Wintel dominance, but Encarta certainly played a part.
- bogantech 3y ago
  > only the PC had Encarta Encarta was available on the Macintosh in the 90s
ChuckMcM 3y ago
To be fair, I would love a curated version of Wikipedia periodically exported as a self contained reference application. I thought this would be a good use of the Internet Archive capabilities too. At Blekko we, of course, crawled all of Wikipedia. One of the more interesting aspects was how many dead links it had to references (which presumably at one time were not dead). Sometimes you could find those references in the wayback machine and sometimes they were just "poof" gone. This is the nature of the web, information isn't persistent. Hence I think periodically pulling it into static storage would be a good thing for longevity.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > One of the more interesting aspects was how many dead links it had to references (which presumably at one time were not dead). Sometimes you could find those references in the wayback machine and sometimes they were just "poof" gone. This is largely a solved problem. There's a number of bots on Wikipedia and other WMF wikis which periodically trigger Internet Archive dumps for all external links which are used as references, and which can replace those references with links to the archive if a site goes offline.
blackoil 3y ago
Is there any for kids Wikipedia equivalent? Targeted for 10 years old. Wikipedia is too dense and drab for someone just excited or curious about a topic.
- jimktrains2 3y ago
  There's the simple english version of wikipedia. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
scrumper 3y ago
I came here to pour scorn on the claims of an attempted multimedia CD-ROM in 1985, but turns out the first one was released in 1987! Red Book was mid '80s. I could've sworn they were a mid 90s thing but this really could have happened in 1985.
snvzz 3y ago
As neither this article nor the Wikipedia one provide a table with version history, I did some digging and found this table[0]. It's interesting. E.g. until "Encarta 96", the application was "16 bit". I wonder if this means that 95 and before worked on a plain 8088 5150. This 95 article[1] claims otherwise (386SX). 0. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Microsoft_Encarta https://betawiki.net/wiki/Microsoft_Encarta 1. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Encarta_%2795 https://betawiki.net/wiki/Encarta_%2795

145 points by rcarmo 3y ago

Synaesthesia 3y ago

Prior to Encarta there was Grolier’s encyclopedia.

pixelesque 3y ago
Indeed, as the article mentions - but the UI for that was pretty bad IMO... The Software Toolworks Multimedia Encyclopedia was better IMO (at least in terms of UI and multimedia), and then from 1995 onwards, Encarta was generally better (again IMO)...

jeremycarter 3y ago

I remember The Hutchinson Educational Encylopedia on CD ROM. https://archive.org/details/the_hutchinson_educational_encylopedia https://archive.org/details/the_hutchinson_educational_encyl...

bknight1983 3y ago

My sister and I used to play Mindmaze for hours during the summer in the 90s. Encarta was such a great resource at the time.

conzept 3y ago

Encarta was a big inspiration for my Conzept project (https://conze.pt https://conze.pt) - a topic exploration system based on Wikipedia, Wikidata and other (pluggable) datasources. See many usage examples here: https://twitter.com/conzept__ https://twitter.com/conzept__

qingcharles 3y ago
Does it pick a random topic for each visitor? Mine was 2 Girls 1 Cup o_O

glimshe 3y ago

We sometimes forget how fortunate we are to have so much information at our fingertips. Even the richest person in the world would have a hard time having enough books to compare to, let's say, Wikipedia.

agumonkey 3y ago

Interesting comment about how pre-wikipedia encyclopedias were more engaging. I felt this with encarta, and old printed volumes. It's written by someone, or told in a different way. While wikipedia feels more like a text book reference.

theFco 3y ago
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[1], while restricted in scope, takes the approach of having experts write the articles that are then revised and evolve with time. So a different approach is possible, but I think it would be hard for an encyclopedia with the breadth of wikipedia to do it. Maybe there is space for more specialised encyclopedias that take the approach of articles having authors and revisions instead of wikis. But all in all, I think both approaches compliment eachother. [1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/ https://plato.stanford.edu/
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  Scholarpedia[1] also exists, but is very sparse and mostly a specialist reference. [1] https://scholarpedia.org/ https://scholarpedia.org/
rchaud 3y ago
Wikipedia is amazing, all things considered. But it's true that Encarta was a more integrated experience, with plenty of licensed images and video. Wiki is open source, so it's limited by having access to CC-NA licensed assets only. It's also firmly an "Internet-first" encyclopedia so it's beauty comes from its SEO-friendly information architecture and internal link structure . I'd bet it's easier for someone to find specific info on Wiki quickly, whereas Encarta would be better as a slow browsing experience.

HeckFeck 3y ago

My favourite trivia for Encarta is that it was built using a rich text view + a custom hypertext system, similar to the old Windows Help format before it all became HTML and IE views.

Narishma 3y ago
As the article states, later versions of Encarta switched to web tech.

masfoobar 3y ago

Think we had Encarta '95 or abouts. I think it was a good tool. Had to uninstall it a number of times when hard drive space was low. I remember using it for homework like History. I was luckly it provided a sentence or two. Not enough to really learn something. Perhaps Encarta '98 onwards were much, much better. Today, we have Wikipedia, google search/maps, assitance like Alexa and, now ChatGPT. Imagine the next 20 years.

giantrobot 3y ago
ChatGPT will happily imagine all sorts of made up facts for you. It's not really a great reference.
- masfoobar 3y ago
  I am mostly referring to the evolution side of these tools, generally speaking

TheRealDunkirk 3y ago

People want me to believe that Microsoft is "new," when people like Phil Spencer have been there since the start, and worked up to things like being the head of Xbox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spencer_(business_executive) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spencer_(business_executi...

qwerty456127 3y ago

Are any peoprietary digital encyclopedias available nowadays? I love Wikipedia and am glad we have it for free but I also know non-free encyclopedias can happen to be much better in some specific ways.

WillAdams 3y ago
That would be _Encyclopædia Britannica_ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Encyclopaedia-Britannica-English-language-reference-work https://www.britannica.com/topic/Encyclopaedia-Britannica-En... Also, _World Book_ is still in print: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/06/rejoice-its-2023-and-you-can-still-buy-a-22-volume-paper-encyclopedia/ https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/06/rejoice-its-2023-and...
- gosub100 3y ago
  I wonder if Wikipedia articles ever cite paid encyclopedias as sources? It's kind of a conundrum: many people who don't trust wikipedia would regard paid products as more "legitimate", but Britannica would presumably not want to be cited because that implicitly helps a free competitor.
  - WillAdams 3y ago
    Wikipedia started out as a copy of a public domain edition of EB. Since then, lots of folks have edited and contributed content. It was a pretty open secret that when Funk & Wagnalls (where Encarta got its content) was first starting that they would pay college students to write articles, the college students would crib from EB or some other similar source, and then submit that.

botanical 3y ago

My parents bought me multiple editions of Encarta in my childhood and I absolutely loved it as we didn't have internet at that time. It was much more than an encyclopaedia; you could explore ancient sites and play educational games. It was great fun. As great a free resource as Wikipedia is, each article's quality relies on a knowledgable contributor to really make it worthwhile, and those are few and far between. Wikipedia is dry and lacks what Encarta had

weinzierl 3y ago

The beauty of Encarta and its printed predecessors is that they are unalterable snapshots of the knowledge and views of their time. I inherited an encyclopedia from the 1930s and it is a constant source of surprise and wonder to me - both in what is different from today and in what I expect to be different but is not. I think Encarta is the last of this generation. Sure, I can download a snapshot from Wikipedia and I did and others did and do as well. It's still not the same, because all our snapshots are different. Anything surprising in there could just be fluke, an editing error, the temporary state of an edit war. A Wikipedia snapshot proves nothing. My 30s encyclopedia on the other hand is a stable reference. If I doubted anything in my copy I could easily find another antiquated copy and compare. Same with Encarta, there are so many copies out there that this particular snapshot of human knowledge will never die.

stakhanov 3y ago
This is a bit off-topic, but how do you actually browse a Wikipedia snapshot? I tried turning a dump [1] into a browseable website hosted locally a few years back, and it seemed anything but trivial. Has any progress been made here? [1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
- mvdwoord 3y ago
  Perhaps with something like Kiwix? I have used it for offline Wikipedia during prolonged travel... https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    Seconded. It's a couple of years and there could be something better now, but I also used Kiwix. It's not perfect, but it works.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- solardev 3y ago

xacky 3y ago

I remember the period where Encarta allowed user contributions to their website but more moderated than Wikipedia. It's a shame that Microsoft gave up on Encarta too soon, it could have been a perfect integration with Bing AI and not subject to the vandalism and notability wars that Wikipedia suffers from.

SantiagoElf 3y ago

The startup sound of Encarta Virtual Globe 98[0] brings me such fond memories :) [0] - https://youtu.be/eNQ5yFlKhls?t=262 https://youtu.be/eNQ5yFlKhls?t=262

bjourne 3y ago

We had Encarta in the library at my school when I was 12. Having previously only used C64 and Amiga it was my first stint with PCs. If you needed to research something for homework say the solar system you would kindly ask the librarian for an Encarta CD-ROM and she would allocate a 45-minute slot at the library's PC.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wayne 3y ago

I interned on Encarta one summer shortly before the fall, and 11 years ago I wrote a Quora answer about why I think it failed, which amusingly still gets upvotes: https://qr.ae/pK2pGA https://qr.ae/pK2pGA

macintux 3y ago

Not mentioned: Microsoft Instruments, a wonderful way to experience music snippets from instruments around the world, which was killed via absorption into Encarta. (I never owned Windows, so I never played with Encarta; it's possible the same experience was achievable, but I like dedicated software to play with when there's no real advantage to integrating it into a larger ecosystem.)

nolamark 3y ago

Should you want to dig deeper, and see view from the other side of the battle. (posted with distant taste of sour grapes in my mouth, aka, I played for the EB side) https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Reference%20Wars%20-%20Greenstein_6c4ac193-51eb-4758-a5a6-a4c412261411.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/Reference%20... https://web.archive.org/web/20031026131928/http://www.howtoknow.com/BOL1 https://web.archive.org/web/20031026131928/http://www.howtok...

BirAdam 3y ago
Article author here, thank you so much for posting this! I truly appreciate it :-)

wicket 3y ago

It's understated the impact that Encarta had on Microsoft dominance in the home computer market. Encarta came about at a time when internet access was not yet commonplace and "multimedia" PCs were next big thing. Amiga, Atari and Apple had CD-ROM drives but only the PC had Encarta. It was revolutionary for 90s teens with homework assignments. These days some might use the term "killer app" to describe it. Obviously there were many other factors that led to Wintel dominance, but Encarta certainly played a part.

bogantech 3y ago
> only the PC had Encarta Encarta was available on the Macintosh in the 90s

ChuckMcM 3y ago

To be fair, I would love a curated version of Wikipedia periodically exported as a self contained reference application. I thought this would be a good use of the Internet Archive capabilities too. At Blekko we, of course, crawled all of Wikipedia. One of the more interesting aspects was how many dead links it had to references (which presumably at one time were not dead). Sometimes you could find those references in the wayback machine and sometimes they were just "poof" gone. This is the nature of the web, information isn't persistent. Hence I think periodically pulling it into static storage would be a good thing for longevity.

duskwuff 3y ago
> One of the more interesting aspects was how many dead links it had to references (which presumably at one time were not dead). Sometimes you could find those references in the wayback machine and sometimes they were just "poof" gone. This is largely a solved problem. There's a number of bots on Wikipedia and other WMF wikis which periodically trigger Internet Archive dumps for all external links which are used as references, and which can replace those references with links to the archive if a site goes offline.

blackoil 3y ago

Is there any for kids Wikipedia equivalent? Targeted for 10 years old. Wikipedia is too dense and drab for someone just excited or curious about a topic.

jimktrains2 3y ago
There's the simple english version of wikipedia. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

scrumper 3y ago

I came here to pour scorn on the claims of an attempted multimedia CD-ROM in 1985, but turns out the first one was released in 1987! Red Book was mid '80s. I could've sworn they were a mid 90s thing but this really could have happened in 1985.

snvzz 3y ago

As neither this article nor the Wikipedia one provide a table with version history, I did some digging and found this table[0]. It's interesting. E.g. until "Encarta 96", the application was "16 bit". I wonder if this means that 95 and before worked on a plain 8088 5150. This 95 article[1] claims otherwise (386SX). 0. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Microsoft_Encarta https://betawiki.net/wiki/Microsoft_Encarta 1. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Encarta_%2795 https://betawiki.net/wiki/Encarta_%2795