It's probably been ten years since I even thought about looking something up in a CDROM encyclopedia, but even now it's kind of sad to think that Encarta is gon

It's probably been ten years since I even thought about looking something up in a CDROM encyclopedia, but even now it's kind of sad to think that Encarta is gone. When I was a kid, my dad bought a double-speed CDROM drive for our Digital Equipment Corporation 486-powered computer, and the 1994 edition of Encarta. At the time, Encarta was the best possible reference for a curious kid. If you just wanted to learn about something interesting, it was way easier than flipping through heavy encyclopedia volumes. I'm sure plenty of this site's readers have innocently gone to a Wikipedia page to look something up, only to find themselves reading a completely unrelated page a half hour later. Encarta was deep enough for a kid to do just that. Some time around 1994 or 1995 (just after we got a modem), I remember reading an article in a magazine comparing three CDROM encyclopedias: Encarta, World Book, and Compton's. There was a sidebar, entitled something like "What about the Web?" The conclusion was that while the Web was promising, it just wasn't comprehensive enough to replace a CDROM encyclopedia. It's funny to think how far we've come. Finally, it's interesting to see how irrelevant encyclopedias are for current schoolchildren. When I was in middle school and early high school, an encyclopedia was the first thing you went to if you needed to write a typical school paper. In eighth grade I had to write a research paper on a topic of my choice; I remember my teacher telling us that while we could start our research with an encyclopedia, we were forbidden to cite it as a source. My eighth-grade brother says he always starts a paper by reading up on Wikipedia -- he's never looked up anything in a traditional encyclopedia.