Most folks at Microsoft don’t realize that Encarta exists and is used TODAY all over the developing world on disconnected or occasionally connected computers. (Perhaps Microsoft could make the final version of Encarta available for a free final download so that we might avoid downloading illegal or malware infested versions?)
What are your fond memories of Encarta? If you’re not of the Encarta generation, what’s your impression of it? Had you heard or thought of it?
I have vague memories of using Encarta back in the early ’90s, but I was much more interested in technology and games as a young kid. These days I tend to read a lot of Wikipedia pages every day, so had I been my current age 25 years ago, I can definitely see myself using Encarta a lot.
In any event, definitely neat that the final version of Encarta – from 2009 – runs just fine on Windows 10.
We had a couple different versions of Encarta on CD back in the Windows 3.x days. I think the first version came with the Compaq all-in-one computer we had, bundled in with MS Works. And I think an updated version came bundled in with my IBM desktop (Windows 95).
The Win3 version was okay if you just wanted to read and look at pictures. The video files that came with it (while awesome to see at first) were tiny little stamp-sized windows with lots of motion blur. Was still neat to “see” and hear MLK’s “I have a dream” speech.
The local school district has a subscription to World Book Online and various other encyclopedia-like resources, so we have no real use for a locally-installed tool like Encarta. But it was certainly fun/interesting back-in-the-day.
Years ago a certain American singer-songwriter who wrote a song about Virginia Woolf gave an interview about the song and the album it came off in which she was under the impression that the author was American. (She was British.) That impression may have come from Microsoft Encarta which had a recording of a passage written by Woolf, voiced by an American woman. Very pretty encyclopaedia and I remember browsing through it at length as a teen but … with poor quality control like that, it’s hard to miss it now.
It was the source of truth for many, and waaay cheaper than that massive set of encyclopaedia sitting on the shelf getting more and more out of date.
Wikipedia is now a defacto source for many, but full of heavily disputed content and a fair bit that is just wrong because it fits someone’s narrative. I wish these alternatives were giving competitive incentives to keep it honest still
If you plan to be off the grid, you can download an offline version of Wikipedia that can be browsed using Kiwix.
That’s great.
As a mac user, we didn’t have Encarta (at least not initially), the first CD-ROM I owned was Grolier’s Encylopedia. Text, High-res B&W images, and Audio. It blew me away. Now you can download all of wikipedia and store it on a phone. What a time to be alive…
I had too the Grolier’s in early 90s (should predate Encarta): it came bundled (in Italy) with the Commodore CDTV while separately was priced > 600EUR (750.000 Lire back in 1992, almost the value of the CDTV itself).