Obviously this is pure nostalgia. Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways. And available to people "in the developing world". (I don't really get why Scott included that part. The number of people who have access to a PC with a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM and also don't have web access via their phones.. my guess is that the total number is about 17, globally.)
I'm sorry, this is just incorrect by somebody who either hadn't fully used Encarta / Compton's, or doesn't remember them.
I have been looking for 5+ years for a tablet or PC "Atlas" which can easily, with a click of button, show me graphs, or colour regions, based on specified criteria such as political types; economy; climate; productivity; and other interesting stats.
Wikipedia articles are horribly inconsistent about format and details they use for different geographic regions. They are even worse at showing overviews, especially across categories and regions. It takes me hours to gather info I'd get in Encarta in a few clicks, at which point I give up. Google Maps doesn't have any of these markings / mappings easily accessible; and neither is trivially accessible offline.
This is not to say Google Maps and Wikipedia aren't AWESOME - because they are; and I wouldn't dream of replacing them with Encarta for 99% of things. But there are significant use cases which have been lost and not replaced with anything of equal ease of use.
FWIW: I'd pay $50+ right now for a good off-line atlas. All I can find in app stores when I search for "Atlas" is scans of maps :S
There is Brittanica Online if you want an edited encyclopedia. And Rand McNally has an online atlas--though I don't have any personal familiarity with it. There's also ESRI.
Seems like Google Earth is a better match for your interests than Google Maps. I don't know if it's still actively maintained, though... you don't hear much about Google Earth anymore. Not new and shiny and disruptive enough, I guess.
A huge portion of Wikipedia data is from the CIA's World Fact Book, which is public information. I wonder if combining that with a 3D rendering of the globe could be a viable product...
One thing nicer about Encarta than Google+Wikipedia was for the most part being able to skip past the "is this trustworthy" step. Critical thinking is important, but the need for defaulting to distrust was less.
Even as a young teen in the eighties I never understood that part of maps, they are so shallow and prone to bias. Even just creating a map with only on the ground facts is always biased, there is always bad editorialization.
I never used Encarta, so it might be great, but you can get better data today at the cost of being harder to use. But a lot less bias.
The content on Wikipedia far exceeds what Encarta had available of course, but Encarta was made during the height of the multimedia boom and features rich interactive media and educational narratives.
That entire time period is full of lost multimedia gems. From cooking CDs that had vetted recipes taught by professional chefs, to the Microsoft Wine Guide![1]
Sure now days all of that information is available on the web, but people have to sort through 90% garbage to find the good stuff. The number of recipes on the web put out by people who just don't even know how to cook is astounding.
There is something to be said for high quality curated experiences, and that is what those multimedia CD-ROMs offered.
Yeah, as the article alludes to, Encarta was a product of the period after CDs came out but before there was much of a WWW, before most people had an Internet connection, and what home connections existed were mostly dial-up modems.
As a result, it was hard not to be in a bit of awe at how much information of various types you could suddenly have at home in the form of little silvery disks.
I would strongly disagree in this case. Wikipedia can be very opinionated and holds bias towards fringe information that has a niche passionate base of followers.
Google provides very shallow info and bites that give rise to information that is clever as opposed to well thought out.
I do not want to infer that they are bad resources, but I would argue that they are significantly lacking in the department of balanced, curated and well thought out information.
For a kid growing up, Encarta was far superior to anything Wikipedia offers today.
Sure, Wikipedia wins in sheer volume but that's it. Encarta was a well curated collection of knowledge that was consistent and perfectly suited for its audience.
That's only true if your brain is perfect and consistent at absorbing and verifying information. Even then, it's unnecessarily reductive.
If you have an enormous amount of information, but know that some unknown 10% of that information is inaccurate (at a facts level, not just in a "I don't agree with the presentation or perspectives portrayed" way), that's dramatically worse than having slightly less information that you can be fairly sure has been (at least factually) verified.
Same with writing quality; a huge amount of information written in a way that your brain can't absorb efficiently (whether because it's in a foreign language, written incoherently, or interspersed with profanity and editorializing) is less useful and worse than less information written in a clear and consistent style.
Okay, let me link to a pastebin with the entire contents of my hard drive in binary form (with sensitive data removed, of course) and you can give it to your niece to read. Surely that information is more useful than a children's book on science. More data is always better by definition.
That is not the correct use of "by definition." More only means more, not better.
... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658
Yeah, "I really miss the era where we were so deprived that now-small things seemed amazing" is a bit of a weird take.
I mean, I have plenty of my own tech nostalgia, like the way at 300 baud you could hear the bits and practically whistle them. Happy memories! But I try never to confuse that with "my childhood was a historical peak". Because it wasn't particularly.
You know plenty of people were just as nostalgic for their encyclopedia volumes and thought kids had it too easy with this CD-ROM nonsense. And I'm sure that people complained that the first encyclopedias made learning too easy, that kids wouldn't value what they didn't work for. And this is a tradition of "the kids are too soft" that goes back at least to Socrates: "[Writing things down] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own."
> "Wikipedia + Google is superior in pretty much all imaginable ways"
Excluding grammar and style maybe. A lot of Wikipedia, including many articles on important subjects, are painful to read. Either because they were written by committee or simply by somebody with poor language skills (sometimes even worse than my own!)
Also Encarta was much more engaging. It wasn’t just a mass of text with a few token images thrown in. It was a carefully curated compilation of multimedia, interactive content, educational games as well as textual write ups. It’s content was also discoverable in a plethora of ways that the web should ideally be suited to yet Wikipedia doesn’t even begin to approach.
Sure, Wikipedia has more articles; but the content is of a significantly lower quality by every other standard going.
Again you’re only discussing things at a textual level. Encarta wasn’t like other encyclopaedias - Encarta was a fully interactive multimedia experience.
The issue yourself and others who haven’t used Encarta is that you’re thinking about it as purely a text document store, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Encarta is more like a museum than it is like Wikipedia. It has a smaller curated set of write ups but has all the interactive exhibits, games, and multimedia content that a good museum has. Wikipedia is about breadth of content where as Encarta was about engagement.
This is something you’d expect the web to excel at but unfortunately the race to breadth of content has resulted in a less interesting delivery of said content.
> The issue yourself and others who haven’t used Encarta is that you’re thinking about it as purely a text document store, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Encarta is more like a museum than it is like Wikipedia. It has a smaller curated set of write ups but has all the interactive exhibits, games, and multimedia content that a good museum has. Wikipedia is about breadth of content where as Encarta was about engagement.
I do have used Encarta, and I really enjoyed it. I felt like you were talking about pure content quality, when it was (as I understand) rather about the way that (good) content is presented. If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience? Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.
> I felt like you were talking about pure content quality
You probably just skimmed my post then because I’m really don’t know terms like “multimedia”, “games”, and phrases like “It wasn’t just a mass of text” could be confused with “pure content quality”.
> If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience?
Absolutely. Encarta isn’t something that is unapproachable. In fact I literally said “This is something you’d expect the web to excel at” in my last comment :)
> Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.
Not only rare, poorly presented as well. Encarta has an engaging UI/UX, Wikipedia isn’t designed that way. So even the few articles with multimedia content are still less engaging than the average Encarta article.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. Sometimes people want their information presented in a bland broadsheet format, other times they want a pretty infograph. Each has their place.
Not purely. Things like the timeline shown near the bottom don't really exist as far as I can tell on Wikipedia. Also the many writers few editors leads to articles feeling rather disjointed at times with information being repeated pointlessly in different ways in different sections sometimes, there's something to be said for the edited entries of yore in that regard.
I think it'd be really neat and useful for wikipedia to add things like that. A filterable searchable timeline to say "show me all the wars fought in or involving country X" or a map with layers showing different information or events.
Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bend the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable.
> Disagree.Your argument is like why buy Financial Times when all the info is out there for free. Wikipedia,while a brilliant invention on its own, is not, and probably never will be a substitute for Encyclopedia type of sources, including Encarta. Subjects like politics, history, nutrition and medicine are very sensitive ones and there's tons of resources out there that tend to either massage the data,or bent the reality all together,which renders them absolutely unreliable.
What make you think Wikipedia would be more prone to these problems than other encyclopedia, including Encarta? Research has shown that the quality of Wikipedia is comparable to other encyclopedias, which might surprise some people given that anyone can edit it. Encarta will never have specialist in all domains known on Earth; something that Wikipedia can have.
I included the developing world stuff because it’s true. I’ve lived all over the African continent and no, not everyone is connected always. Sometimes there’s just an old PC in a room, disconnected. My mother in law taught in lower Gweru and they have no internet. What little digital work is done is moved on USB sticks. Encarta is used all over Cuba, Iraq, and elsewhere.
I'd disagree. Encarta had different, almost magazine-like ways to present information. Google has too many blind alleys these days, and Wikipedia is very inconsistent.
Wikipedia is great, until you need to explain to children how to weigh the credibility of the information provided.
I cam here to say similar, although I'd phrase it as "Encarta was amazing in the 90's, but with Wikipedia you get a much richer and in depth encyclopedia, albeit without the interactive/multimedia type interface that kids might prefer".
I'd also say that a monthly dump of Wikipedia to DVD/BluRay/USB would meet the offline requirements. Or as you say mobile phone internet access (for low bandwidth ... is WAP still a thing?)
I was going to submit this earlier today, but I thought "nah, nobody else on HN is going to be old enough to remember Encarta" :)
I remember when our family first got Encarta, and I spent hour after hour reading and marvelling about how all this information could be so easily accessible! I think we had a 14k dial-up Internet connection at the time, and the web was barely getting started - I really had no idea how things would turn out!
I remember a period where Compton's was coming bundled with a lot of CD-ROM drives, but Encarta felt so much better. We'd have multiple copies of Compton's floating around and would have to struggle to find that valuable Encarta CD.
Are you kidding me? Encarta was the bomb. As a kid, in the days before the computer was an endless source of information and distraction, I would just browse Encarta and learn random stuff.
Once some kid in my third grade class asked why race cars made noise they do when they passed, the teacher didn't give a satisfactory answer, and I was able to explain the Doppler effect to them based on animation I watched on Encarta.
Oh no, I've been looking for "modern Encarta" for years, in particular something that would easily show me different regions coloured by statistics and criteria - the ability to pick part of the earth, and then colour selected regions by economy, or productivity, or politics, or whatever, was phenomenal. Tablets _should_ be such a natural device for an educational geography product; but with free Google Maps + Wikipedia, nobody seems to be trying (at least I cannot find anything useful in my once-yearly attempts).
This is something I plan to work on after getting my PhD in a few years. It's technically challenging, but there is so much things to do pedagogically around historical & linguistics maps on the globe.
There was all of one or two internet providers in our county where I grew up at that time. Maybe one. We couldn’t afford it yet but my parents bought Encarta because it seemed like a wholesome tract for computer use.
I spent countless hours on there and used it for a ton of homework. IIRC my parents used it all the time as well. They likely still have the disks kicking around someplace.
Are you kidding me? The only way hearing the opening screen again[0] could evoke more warm fuzzy nostalgia with me is if at the end it would crossfade into Baba Yetu from Civ IV's main menu screen[1].
Besides Encarta, the mid 90s where also the time where I was first able to buy satellite imagery on CR-ROM for all of Germany from my collected lunch money and years before Microsoft's TerraServer changed the world, which itself was long before Google Maps took over.
Given that Encarta was the bomb in the late 90's and early 00's and the 25-35 age group is well represented on HN I'd say Encarta i prime HN nostalgia material.
22 here and I remember Encarta very fondly. I did not use it very often as back then paperback encyclopedias were still a "thing" and Wikipedia was pretty ok too; but I definitely reading about random physicists in Encarta. It was fun!
Well, we're talking about mid to late 2000s (~15 years ago). Remember that Encarta was supported until 2009. And I grew up in a developing country so everything was happening with a few years lag.
That came from a different era, a different world of software and product development. Everything is MVP now. We care about how it drives the metrics/KPIs, and if it doesn't, you better figure it out or it's gonna get shitcanned.
I had access to Encarta on my grandparents' computer when it came bundled with their Windows 95 computer, but in my home I had Undersea Adventure, which came bundled with our Win 3.1 machine. Man, I learned a lot about sharks and nudibranchs.
Nostalgia is a beautiful thing. Encarta was freaking magic back in the day, but I'm certain that if I or Hanselman or anyone else were forced to use it exclusively today they would throw the computer out of the window in frustration.
Encarta had a time and place when I, as a child, had access to disks and wikipedia did not exist yet. What is the point today? Vastly inferior in terms of content by volume, controlled by a single corporation with black box changes to articles (as opposed to Wikipedia's history tracking), impossible to dynamically update after release... I could go on.
Edit: I absolutely cannot stand the smarmy "I wrote code that you use" on his homepage. Sorry buddy, you probably don't.
I remember moving schools at age 12 and the computers in the library had encarta. My friends had PCs with CDROMs and could print out Encarta for homework where I was stuck copying stuff out from a paper encyclopedia. Memories!
There also was the Encyclopedia Brittanica, not sure how it compares to Encarta. I remember getting it on DVD or CD and choosing it instead of Encarta. No idea where it went.
I'm not sure if the information is better or more complete then an offline Wikipedia dump combined with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I preferred the Brittanica and thought Encarta was written for 10 year olds. I remember the technology was weird, like the articles were pdfs embedded in the web browser or something like that.
I still regularly use the DVD version of Brittanica (it's good for looking things up on planes when I don't have internet connections and is a supplement to offline versions of Wikipedia). The quality is certainly better than Encarta which was based on a more cut-rate competitor to Brittanica.
Brittanica was the king of encyclopedias at that time, as far as I can remember. I had a set of those, and I remember comparing and finding other sets to be less good. I was pretty young but I spent a TON of time with them. I don't have experience with the Brittanica CDs but my guess is the content was of similar quality.
I miss it as well, as the author points out it isn't large and is easily contained on a thumbnail flash drive (several times over!).
I've started creating an offline reference library[1] because I see that search engines will be over whelmed with crap and frankly I don't want to have to find cell service to ask my handheld device to locate a factoid.
If you've read that now more than 50% of Google desktop searches don't result in a click, it is because Google is getting better at 'one boxing' the answer so you don't need to click through to read it.
[1] That project started by digitizing my referenced by less often used text books. Which lead to me digitizing text books for others as well. After Google's win on digitizing books is fair use for air cover much of the work applies NLP and a bit of machine learning to pull out facts which are not, in themselves copyrightable.
An interesting question that I have yet to have a good answer for. The fair use exemption was pretty good air cover for using the digitized data, but text book publishers are rather litigious bunch. Not a bear I want to poke just yet.
The idea came from the fact that I wanted to play with the NLP work and wanted more useful data sets to start from (parsing Shakespeare gets old :-). And the fact that my fairly simple search engine for PDFs was basically just a classic n-tuple index into the word clouds minus stop words and gave good recall (like the old AltaVista) but not good precision.
Another comment in this thread about having a tablet to do that suggests an interesting way to deploy something like this on inexpensive table hardware with a somewhat more bespoke (aka performant) OS and application architecture for appliance type operation. (think running a unikernel rather than a general purpose kernel in order to not spend cycles on things you won't ever need)
I have a Fujitsu Scansnap 1500 and a heavy duty paper guillotine (basically a very sharp, very tall blade, kind of like this one on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/HFS-Heavy-Guillotine-Paper-Cutter/dp/...). The ScanSnap came with a license to Abbyy's OCR software (which is good for words but it makes for interesting jumbles when you have tables and of course no math recognition). And the Foxit PDF editor version.
Since most of the text books I've scanned are hard covers I cut off the covers, scan those on flatbed scanner, then disassemble the binding to remove the pages. Cut off the margins to get to something closer to 8.5" wide (more modern text books have been "experimenting" with page sizes).
Disassembly takes about 20 minutes, scanning takes another, 10 minutes depending on how many sets I need to scan (the paper feeder for the ScanSnap is nominally 75 pages, but if it gets overloaded can misfeed). Occasionally I'll get a misfeed (two pages feed at the same time) and I generally clean the paper handling belts every 10 or 15 books because they get accumulation that make them less effective at gripping the paper.
Ah, I should have guessed it would be a destructive process. Still something I'll keep in mind but I have a particular weakness about destroying old books, even if intellectually I understand 1) it's not a valuable book and 2) there are other copies out there and 3) it's worth more to me in PDF form.
The process used by the Internet Archive and Google for digitizing books is nondestructive; the Archive open-sourced the plans for their "Scribe" book-scanning machine, and others have made downloadable plans for laser-cuttable versions. It's slower than running a destroyed book through a sheeet-fed scanner (typically you get on the order of ten two-page scans per minute), but it's suitable even for rare books.
I completely understand that sentiment! I definitely have books that I keep because they are valuable to me both as a book and as the information they contain.
Textbooks, are by their nature, more 'conduits of information' than works of art. (TAOCP not withstanding). Also they get regularly re-issued in order to be resold to students so their knowledge is more widely dispersed than many books.
When I was at Google I visited the book scanning operation a couple of times and they had these machines that would photograph a page, dewarp, and some of them even turn the page (some required a person to turn the pages). While I would love to have such a capability, the only way I could justify it would be to have texts I needed to add to my data set that were not mine to destroy.
My work-around for this issue so far has been to find and buy a second copy of a book on the used market to digitize, best of both worlds for me in that situation.
Non-destructive scanning is very much an option, but it's slower, more expensive and requires a bulky rig. It's probably only worth the effort if you're a serious data hoarder.
If you have a handful of precious books that you really can't bear to cut up, commercial non-destructive scanning services are available at ~$30 per book.
Only $30? (No missing 0?) That's on average (assuming a range of novels to textbooks thay makes the average...) only doubling the book cost to get a copy in another format.
Not ideal (IMO buying the physical book should entitle you to a zero marginal cost PDF copy too, which some publishers do adhere to) but certainly better than I expected.
I miss it and I also miss a real encyclopedia collection. They both offer a thing Wikipedia always lacks: consistency, in writing style, in topic depth, in error rate. I still remember the weekend in 90s when I had a copy of Encarta and threw the whole weekend to click through topics after topics, and amazed at things it offered. It’s so much fun.
They had to pick and choose what to go into depth on, but when they wanted to go into depth, they would hire the best writers in the field to explain everything really well. Issac Asimov penned more than one encyclopedia article, as did other science fiction authors.
I honestly learned most of my fundamental science knowledge from old 1950s and 1960s science fact books. Asimov in particular has multiple books that explain science really well, down to the level of nuclear fusion and fission, biochemistry, and a lot of other subjects, and I had a few other books in the same vein that were all really old, and really good.
I remember one book that was biographies of famous scientists, it went into depth about Marie Curry and her contributions to science. Reading that ~age 10 certainly impacted my views on gender equality and helped me believe that potential is not limited by gender.
Wikipedia, for all the great things about it, won't really do that. There isn't a Wikipedia page I can point literally anyone[2] at and say "read this and you'll understand the fundamentals of radiation and atomic physics".
I am sure such resources are out there on the web, but the odds of stumbling upon those resources at random is less than the odds of coming across a good science book at random in a thrift store.
That said there are some awesome YT science channels who have worked to fill this gap in quite well, but video sources are different than written sources, with each having their strength. (I read that short 10 or so page biography of Marie Curry probably a half dozen times, not going to do that with a YT video!)
[2] Where anyone is defined as "age 10 and up, with no mathematical background, who wants to be entertained while they read."
I think if you start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation you'll find everything you need. It's not all in a single linear article, but that's mostly a strength of the Wikipedia style.
That's the point, though. Having it curated and written by experts puts them in control of what direction you go. Realistically, I could click through the radiation article on wikipedia, and may be exposed to what I need to know, but I also could just wander down a rabbit hole of useless information.
That's the entire point. I'm not the expert. Nor am I able to even understand the basics of which direction to read/learn - that's what the expert curators are for.
I think it's not error rate, but signal-to-noise ratio. Wikipedia has a lot of noise and is suitable for a critical reader. Old encyclopedias has less quantity but better quality. The whole situation mirrors the old curated internet vs. the new. We still haven't found a situation that is better in every respect between these two extremes.
The period of time before the infiniteness of the internet but after CD-ROMs could pack lots of information was fascinating to grow up in. You had lots of curiosity but still limited access to information so you deeply explored stuff.
Add to that, something like Encarta was curated by opinionated editors (whether or not you agree with them is different from the fact that the nature of content is different when it isn't trying to find consensus amongst absolutely everyone) and did not survive based on advertising as most internet content does today.
That set of factors made for a very different world of reading than today.
>You had lots of curiosity but still limited access to information so you deeply explored stuff.
I was about to write this myself. Wikipedia has so much information that it’s easy to surf page to page, link out, etc, and end up having skimmed 50 articles and still not understand the thing you came to look at.
This makes me think about when I used to go to the MacWorld convention in San Francisco as a kid in the early 90's. My mom would take me out of school every year to go (just for the expo hall, we didn't have enough money to actually go to the conference).
I was just overwhelmed by all the different software on offer, and would load up my bag with free samples and spec sheets for software I had no legitimate need for as a 10 year old, but I ate it all up. I would ride the BART home after, just pouring over my loot and being so excited to try the demos at home.
I went a few times after the internet took off, and it just wasn't the same. Who needs demos from an expo hall, when you can just download everything? There was nothing new to see at the hall, everything could be seen from your home just by visiting a url.
I love the world with the internet, but there certainly has been something lost.
Same for me with magazines. I’d read them cover to cover, even Computer Shopper which was mostly ads! It gave great breadth of knowledge and it was genuinely interesting because they had to be informative. I devoured them all. I miss that.
those ads in computer shopper where how you learned what was coming into your price bracket in the next 1-2 years. You saw an external 8x (!) speed CD burner and knew you'd be able to afford one within ~18 months.
This feeling has swept over me, too. We didn't fully realize it at the time, but it was the twilight of our culture being transmitted through "big", tangible products with a distinct publishing apparatus like those demo CDs, VHS tapes, books, newspapers, TV programs etc. Everything went online and became both more available and harder to appreciate - although the old stuff has never gone away entirely, it's just waiting for us to look up from the screen now and then.
I was lucky to have Encarta at home when in school. I remember one kid complaining that I did well in a homework assignment because I had Encarta and the science teacher simply said he can't stop someone from using it to learn.
It's nice that knowledge has become widely accessible with the Internet. The hard part I find now is knowing how to learn with so much access to information.
I remember in the late 80s and early 90s during the summers when it was too hot to be outside, we'd sit in the den watching PBS with a World Book Encyclopedia tome in our lap just flipping through the pages.
I had Encarta '97 as an 11yo, purchased at a Malaysian street vendor market for probably all of 3 bucks. It felt incredible to have that much knowledge available for almost no money. And it wasn't just boring text like the paper versions, there were videos too!
There was point in time where that truly felt like the future. Considering that we're now in the age of autoplaying, monetized "content" video nearly everywhere you go, it was nice to have only "primary source" video, aka stuff like the moon landing, or the MLK speech, instead of some nobody warbling on about its importance while splicing in stills of said video because they don't want to be in violation of the copyright.
The concept of finite, structured and bounded content is also extremely powerful in this era of overwhelming data, much of which rehashed and warmed over by various publications not to mention utterly infested with ads.
The concept of spending hours down a Wikipedia rabbit hole is not new, and it's one of the reasons I donate annually. But it first started with Encarta, and it's offline-only format has grown to be only more valuable as time goes on.
Pretty sure the hours-long rabbit hole thing didn’t start with Encarta :D But you still would have been considered a geek of the highest order doing it with Encarta. Wiki first popularized the experience.
I actually used to have a custom TVTropes Greasemonkey script, that would disable all the links on a TVTropes article. That way I could read it if someone linked an article through a forum or other, but I couldn't go down the rabbit hole. Super simple, little overkill, worked great as a deterrent/speed bump.
Pretty much same experience but in Argentina. I got Encarta 97 or 98 for 5 pesos, 5 dollars at that time, when I was 11 years old. Later I read about a Visual Basic course in a newspaper so I figured out that the way to build software was using this Visual Basic software. So I went to the same place where I bought Encarta and got Visual Basic 5, which was my first programming language.
I'm guessing you were only able to access Encarta because copyright enforcement wasn't strong here in Argentina? (Or was US$5 the Microsoft official price?) What do you think about my comment on Kiwix and Wikipedia at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101?
Bill Gates wrote the "open letter to hobbyists" in 1976, when software "piracy" wasn't even clearly illegal, because it wasn't clear that software was copyrightable. We're talking about 1998, 22 years later. It had been on Microsoft's radar since 1976. 1998 was in the heyday of the SPA and "Don't copy that floppy!", as if sharing information were a morally suspect thing to do.
The USTR Special 301 Report already existed in 1998 and already singled out countries for possible trade sanctions for doing the kinds of things that permitted the US to develop economically in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I don't know if Argentina was already specifically targeted, though it was in later years, especially due to La Salada (Q.E.P.D.).
I've had a similar Encarta experience as you and the GP.
Even the VB5 bit is identical. Bought a 2-3$ Encarta copy from a random guy in a random store selling pirated CDs. I remember the guy sitting in his small shop, downloading stuff over Torrent and burning them to CDs. He had a machine with the most CD-writers I had ever seen in my life.
I loved flying over terrains in Encarta's terrain explorer (or whatever it was called, I didn't really understand English back then, perhaps even learned it through Visual Studio and Encarta). Whenever I was bored and kids do get bored often, I would get on Encarta, especially since Wikipedia wasn't a thing back then.
Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity elements of Encarta make it something that you kind of wish had a more direct role in the modern day.
I wrote about this topic a few years ago (https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to speak up (I added some of his comments to the piece). There was a lot of back-room wheeling and dealing around digital encyclopedias during that era, much of it centered around Encarta—Microsoft acquired a lot of publishers during that period and it effectively disrupted most of the rest out of existence.
But even considering that, Encarta was special. I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story.
It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate.
I remember getting Encarta 95 back when it first came out (I was 14 at the time) and the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information and got me that much more invested in learning technology.
Literally a week after getting Encarta a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house and I showed him why I did not need his books. You could see the look of terror in his eyes.
> a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house
That's an alien relic of an anecdote as there ever was.
The world has profoundly changed in the last twenty five years. Cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing has almost completely rewired society and changed business, jobs, dating, friendship, travel.
I really wonder what the next big changes will be. Cheap satellites in orbit and dramatically reduced LEO costs? Better battery tech? Advances in materials science? Human cloning and genetic modification? What modern trappings of the present time will feel used and dated in twenty years?
In Encarta’s case, cheap, high density storage mediums were passed by something that already existed and had existed for quite some time before, the internet. In other regards maybe the storage medium was just a side detail and the important part was what could be done with that data thanks to faster computers.
There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future already being here but not being evenly distributed seems appropriate.
As Encarta was being developed (~1991 per another comment here), the Internet was still highly nascent. I was at uni during this period, and a major bragging right of the campus I was on was dedicated high-speed network connections to other schools within the university system ... over 56K leased lines. Those were shared amongst the 100k+ student, faculty, and staff population (though a very small fraction of those used it).
The takeaways I get of this:
1. Exponentially-developing technology can pass you by quickly. The Internet went from exceedingly obscure to global in the ten years of the 1990s. Broadband wasn't ubiquitous by 1999, but it was increasingly available.
2. Standards matter. Even constructing a workstation that could handle reading Encarta was a challenge, and the tools to compose, render, and especially, present multimedia content (images, audio, video) were not common. Microsoft went the closed-source proprietary route, dooming them to the dustbin (though pieces were salvaged).
3. Standards are hard. Re-read above.
4. There are thresholds of utility that make or break things. I've been around infotech long enough (somewhat pre-dating the periods discussed here) that I've seen numerous technologies go from extreme cutting edge to widely adopted to passe. (And quite a few proposed but never gaining critical mass.) The reasons why any given tech fails right now are numerous. Luck plays a major role.
The present has exceptionally cheap bulk storage (my tablet has a 128GB removable microSD card for about $50), high-speed, ubiquitous, and wireless networking, and tools for sharding and distributing updated documents and file formats (git, rysnc, etc.). This makes distributed updatable large-scale works possible.
The technology of written works has undergone several seismic shifts, from clay tablet to papayrus roll to codex to moveable type. Less well-known (but only slightly) are the updatable formats: loose-leaf, three-ring, and replaceable bindings, all introduced in the late 19th century, which enabled updatable works. These were true "periodicals", where sections could be updated with amendments or replacements as information changed.
The database, digital file, early version control, Wiki, and distributed version control are, IMO, all legitimately novel forms of written works, which should be recognised as such. They have and will continue to change how content is created and used, and affects and interacts with society.
I think the phase that usurped Ecarta's position had more to do with good quality web search and to a lesser extent the crowdsourcing model of Wikipedia (run by a foundation rather than a for profit mega corporation) than to content or data standards.
Search within an encyclopedia (e.g., Wikipedia) doesn't rely on Web search generally (e.g., DDG).
I can see your point that content outside a curated context replaces an encyclopedia to an extent, and up until about 5-10 years ago, as clickbait and black-hat SEO finally won out, much noncommercial Web content was at least informative, if of generally lower quality than traditional printed sources. Convenience has a huge edge over quality, though. These days, it's Wikipedia's curated content, especially for complex breaking news stories, that is my first go-to. After Idleword's (Maciej Cezglowski's) piece on Hong Kong hit HN last week, I finally took a look at Wikipedia's article on the protests there. A full 73 page long article with references on a protest movement only a couple of months old. That's staggering, and exceeds all but the very best news sources. (Another case I'd noted was the Oroville Dam case, where Brad Plumer's article for Vox was the only trad med piece I could find even remotely approaching Wikipedia's article. The first instance of this I recall was the 2004 Boxing Day quake/tsunami in Indonesia / Indian Ocean.)
Wikipedia, on the other hand, greatly enhances Web search, though it also benefits generally from the high profile resulting from that.
Wikipedia's crowdsourcing, the reliance on underlying technologies (Wiki, HTML, mediawiki markup), and on a huge set of organisational systems, standards, practices, and solutions Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation have arrived at, were transformational. Though those too strongly resemble the largely equivalent or analogous practices of earlier encyclopaedic efforts dating back to at least Diderot, as well as other reference works (OED, see Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman).
(Note: updated to add 2nd 'graph beginning "I can see your point...")
The arrival of good internet search along with the ever increasing pool of web content doomed a curated content approach such as was used by Encarta (which could never aspire to be as broad or deep as the web). I can tell you, based on watching sales figures and talking to many customers, that web search was a much bigger factor for the business than was Wikipedia. In any case it would have been much trickier to get the level of crowd input given to Wikipedia by a for profit enterprise. Regardless of tools or formats used.
Btw despite the brief lifespan of the product, Encarta gave Microsoft reasonable return on investment. And arguably more importantly, it helped to quickly entrench the Multimedia PC standard, especially in homes. Which helped reduce Cost Of Goods Sold for all of the company's products, which netted a very nice return in cost savings.
> The technology of written works has undergone several seismic shifts, from clay tablet to papyrus roll to codex to moveable type.
This confuses a number of different types of technology. For example, we haven't undergone a shift from codices -- we still use that form for all our written works today.
Clay and papyrus are materials on which text is written. Scroll and codex are physical forms in which long texts are organized. Movable type is a technology for recycling printing blocks. None of those three types of things are related to the other two, except that it's impossible to store clay as scrolls because it will dry. Clay is stored looseleaf.
Interestingly, the history of writing in the Near East shows exactly the same confusion -- a big reason written Aramaic grew more popular than Akkadian was that it was drawn on paper and Akkadian was carved into clay, despite the fact that logically nothing's stopping you from carving letters into clay or drawing cuneiform on paper.
I'm compressing thoughts for brevity. The codex, handwritten, allowed random access, but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy. They were chained, the language was standardised -- you brought readers to the work (Latin) rather than works to readers (vernacular).
Moveable type, cheap paper, mass literacy, vernacular language, typographic conventions, high-speed presses, and mass distribution, create a wholly different impact.
As Elizabeth Eisenstein noted, the printing press is an agent of social change. Generalised, all comms tech is.
So do scrolls. You're not supposed to open the entire scroll at once. The codex is better at this.
> but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy.
This is nonsense. You can prepare a very expensive book, but you don't have to. The idea that books were necessarily earth-shakingly expensive to create conflicts with the known reality of commercial popular novels in the ancient world.
Makes you wonder, will there ever be a replacement for the Internet?
What would that look like? An incompatible sister network that offers something the existing internet does not offer? A new network created after major disasters and world wide nuclear war destroy all existing infrastructure? I can’t imagine the existing internet would ever be replaced, certainly not by something offering privacy like ToR, because not enough people really care about privacy. The average person doesn’t really give a damn.
Chances are, just like modern internet took advantage of old communication technology (telephone wires) to spread, the "next" internet will take advantage of the "current" one.
"Replacement in what sense?" probably deserves exploration.
The underlying fundamental concepts of the Internet are 1) packet-switched (as opposed to through-circuit) communications, and inter-connected networks, via BGP.
There's a lot that's layered on top of this which is seen as fundamental, but is not entirely so, most especially end-to-end connectivity and universal point-to-point access. The Internet formed under tremendously different conditions than exist today, with only a handful of nodes through 1980, and even as late as the late 1980s only a few thousands.
Roughly each order-of-magnitude increases since then seem to have come with its own set of additional headaches and concerns, mostly regarding management and mitigation of abuse. The idea of guarded borders has long been seen as anathema. I see it as all but inevitable, and the question is whether that's done well or poorly.
There are a number of earlier networking ideas which might resurface or be adapted for new use, and a survey of history might be useful here. (John S. Quarterman's The Matrix, 1990, is a fascinating time-capsule exploration of these just at the cusp of the modern Internet -- the World Wide Web does not even make mention, though "The Web, a national Canadian nonprofit conferencing system formed in 1987, does.
I'd also look at uses of the Internet and user needs.
Fundamentally, digital networks serve as communications and control media. Whether or not these need to (or can be) segregated is an open question, but splitting off, say, the IoT from other communications, might make sense, along with SCADA and military communications -- all largely control networks.
Splitting out video and voice from text and data, likewise. Much of high-demand comes from those.
As the Internet heads from the first billion or two users to the remaining five or so, questions of what technology, interfaces, and devices are appropriate for a set of digital newcomers may be worth consideration.
Or, looking at this differently: the degree to which those already here may be interested in maintaining a separate space for themselves. Not that this is necessarily equitable, but it may well prove to be attractive, say, in particular to minimise fraud and other malicious use or attacks originating from the global poor, who are in many ways justified in wanting some of the pie that's been denied to, or taken from, them.
How the needs, wants, attractions, and/or detractors or aversions affect technology development and adoption remains to be seen.
Yah. People will just die. Refugee sort of implies a refuge. There’s not going to be such thing’s around if things go south as we fear they are likely to. It’s gonna play out far more like the Old Testament.
It depends on where you look. Glaciers pick up material for sure, but where they melt, it is all deposited as glacial till which provides nice heavy soil for agriculture. As Greenland thaws, all this stuff will be deposited upon it. Ireland for instance, and parts of the UK have been beneficiaries of this.
Also, worth considering is that it is virgin territory for exploration for minerals and other goodies.
No shortage of water either.
But even all that aside, it is newly available space. If you can build a city in a desert (Phoenix, Arizona lets say) you can build one on Greenland.
The only reason you can build a city in a desert is the abundance of cheap energy and the ability to build what it needs elsewhere. These two conditions are not met in an hypothetic refuge.
As for soil, the creation of soil in Ireland and the UK took quite a bit of time.
I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that people socialize more in the subway than they used to, now that they can send WhatsApp audio messages to their friends instead of reading a novel. But the grocery store half a block away still sells food in much the same way they did in 1994. Bigots still yell at me on the street to go back to my own country. Most of the workforce is still employed rather than gigging, financially independent, consulting, or riding the purple wage. International money transfers still take a significant percentage, unless you use Bitcoin, which most people still don't accept. Elections are still being won by polarizing populists who promise paradise and then pick your pockets; here in Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner even kept the records of her illegal wiretaps in paper form in the secret vault under her house, facilitating access to them against her will by the police. (And that didn't stop her from getting re-elected last week; her opponent also has a history of illegal wiretaps.)
You'd think that universal access to all human knowledge would have remade society, but actually most of the humans don't really seem to care about knowledge. We got the Arab Spring, which turned into Daesh, the Syrian Civil War, and a new military dictatorship in Egypt. (And we got anti-vaxxers, global warming denialists, and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams.") Wikileaks didn't really move the needle on Obama's re-election. If cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing is rewiring the power structures of society, that's more because of Russian trolls and Twitter bots than anything else.
Probably the changes you're talking about will come. But I'm not convinced that it's a revolution that cute girls on the bus give me their Instagram instead of their phone number.
Oh, that's a good point — also it's a lot easier to convert Italian currency to French, German, or Dutch currency now, since they're all the same currency. I think that may be more a question of what the current political alignment is rather than the internet rewiring world society, though.
(Not OP) TransferWise tends to have a pretty good rate (usually sub 1%), though you would have to transfer a considerable amount of money in one go to get it down to 0.5%.
I use transferwise' borderless account, I believe their fee varies, but I am sure I used TW to transfer less than $10K to EUR for a fee of 0.38%. It now says[0] it's $4.48 to convert 1000$. Changing $1000 to HUF has $4.98 in fees.
Both were lower a couple months ago.
Revolut will also allow you to move 5K GBP per month without any fees[1].
For the ~95th–99th percentile wealth class, the world has changed considerably. For instance, I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently. As a business owner, I can find an international market for my product in a matter of months. I can get anywhere I need to without owning a car. I can maintain a high salary while living in a remote location, of traveling.
For the majority of people, however, things have changed little.
...yea. Weird. But now once you get their you can video conference call with a loved one for cheap, which in a sense takes some of the magic out of traveling as you're never really that much farther away than if you had gone to the grocery store.
You can always leave the phone at home, or simply turn it off till some emergency comes and then immediately turn it off again.
It might sound pretty awkward these days of pathetic instagram 'celebrities', but actually makes things like backpacking in the middle of nowhere much, much better experience. The magic is still out there
Yeah, I thought about saying that, but then I realized maybe the dude is talking about rural Tajikistan or something where there were and are no hotels, and I didn't want to be argumentative. (I imagine in rural Tajikistan random people would be delighted to offer you their hospitality, though.) I did travel around Costa Rica in 2003, and I never needed more than an hour to find a place to stay on arriving in a new town, even though internet access was scarce. So I'm not sure what the guy is talking about there.
The other things he said are mostly true. Here in Buenos Aires I've never owned a car, but that has more to do with being a huge megalopolis than anything else.
I don’t know, I’d say for the majority of people who aren’t so narrowly focused on conspiracy theories and political power struggles, life looks way different than it did 30 years ago.
Even in poor countries Facebook and cheap instant communication like WhatsApp have rewired the way people socialize and stay in touch.
This is mostly a response to the commenter before you, except your last sentence.
Life for ordinary Britons has changed enormously in my lifetime. In my youth it was unusual for someone to holiday abroad, now it's routine.
A budget flight to the continent and a week in an AirBnB in Europe can cost as little as a few hundred quid. Something that was only really available to the rich, or at least the very well off, is now available to almost anyone.
Ordinary Britons may not be in the 95th to 99th percentile wealth class, but they're in the 90th to 99th percentile. But I don't think that what you're talking about is a question of technology, much less of the internet — it's a matter of deregulation and political alignment, something that is coming to an end with Brexit. Aviation technology advanced in leaps and bounds from the 1890s to the 1960s and has only improved incrementally since 1970. (And of course we no longer have Concorde at any price.)
If we're talking outside the western world, things have changed far more dramatically. Across the developing world, hundreds of millions of people have risen out of abject poverty. My wife grew up in China, in a house her father built from a pile of bricks provided by his employer. She helped make their floor tiles, and this was in an industrial city. China's a different world now, and while they are the poster child, this trend isn't isolated to them. The chart linked below is astounding.
My family was never one to spend a dollar if we could spend a nickel, so our encyclopedia was significantly out of date, as was our globe. But if you knew that the USSR didn’t really exist anymore, everything else was pretty much the same. Most knowledge doesn't become wrong; it just becomes history.
I moved to London last year and have used cash roughly zero times since. Visiting my parents (outside London) is like jumping in to treacle. Finding coins for the bus? Paper tickets on the train? Give me a god damn break. Even using chip and pin is weird now since almost all my purchases, except for dining out, are either touchless, online, or via mobile app.
In 20 years i think cash (banknotes, coinage), and maybe even bank accounts as we know them today, will be an almost alien concept to kids. Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade.
> Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade.
Don't have a safety deposit box with precious metals and jewels inside?
Many, many people do - among other items (guns, cash, drugs, etc).
While "brick and mortar" banks may not exist, something of the same nature will - some kind of high-security place to store stuff like that, away from home. Maybe it will also be combined with some kind of networked backup storage for data as well...
To an extent, places like this do exist - private vault companies; always have.
I guess my point is that physical banks offer other services which can't be replicated virtually.
I seem to recall reading an article on HN a few weeks ago about how banks are pulling out of the safety deposit business now that their new branches don't really need vaults for cash, and it's not clear that any replacement for those services is emerging with the same geographic reach as the retail banking system.
Why do you think "safety deposit box" is a "safe deposit box", just because of the name and branding?
Give this a try, go open and put some rock in your safe deposit box, then call the bank and tell them you placed a C4 explosive in the box and will detonate it if they dont deposit gold under a park-bench in 2 days time.
My parents got us a full blown Encyclopedia Britannica book set in the 80s. Probably cost $1000 which was difficult by how much they made. But they paid it down monthly. I used to have loads of fun thumbing through those books. There were a few index books where you looked up a topic and it would refer you to a page in one of the other books. Closest thing to the internet back then.
I had a World Book and then an Encyclopedia Britannica growing up. They gave me many many hours of pleasure. (I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.)
And, yes, I seem to recall the price was something in the $500-$1000 ballpark. Which was definitely a lot of money in the early 70s(?) when I got it--and, yes, the salesman came to the house.
> I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.
Same here! The knowledge was obsolete but the memories of my childhood were a part of it. I eventually recycled most of them after I last moved but there are a few books I still have somewhere.
I inherited a 1952 World Book set from an older cousin, then part-exchanged it for a 1979 set (plus the 1980 "Year Book" update) thanks to the encyclopedia salesman. The normal price would have been around $1000 even then. Today they weigh down/stabilize one of my freestanding bookshelves in the living room.
>I still have the Britannica in my garage. I've cleaned out a lot of things over the years but I can't bring myself to toss that.
A few years ago, during a move,I finally parted with the set my parents had gotten in the late 60s or early 70s. It was painful, but I had to really downsize at the time.
I still have my 1911 edition, which I can't get rid of, even if I haven't cracked a volume in a couple of years.
I had a complete set of the Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia when I was a kid in the early 80s. They'd send you a magazine-sized section each week and you'd gradually build up to a full set which you could bind yourself in the provided hardback covers.
I think subscribing to that was one of the best things my parents ever did for my education. Over the course of my youth I devoured it several times and credit it to my earliest exposure to countless subjects that they'd never touch at school.
One of the most notable things about The Joy of Knowledge was the extraordinary explanatory art. One day I will have to find my books and make some scans.
Another skill not taught today - how to use a library card catalog.
Looking up things in the card catalog, and on microfiche at my local library, was as much fun as locating the book itself. Sometimes, in the course of searching the catalog, I'd come across other books that sounded interesting, so I would write down those call numbers, too.
Or browsing microfiche roll magazines and newspapers - high speed fast forward and reverse, then for 10 cents a page (!) pop off a copy to take home.
That is one part I don't miss - having to pay for photocopies...
Yeah it is THE software for multi-media showcase. Back in 90s I had a copy of shareware/demo version and it already blowed my mind off. The whole collection was like a dozen CD I think? I never got the chance to see it though. Nowadays we still don't have something that match up the experience.
the interactive elements and audio clips blew my mind. It changed how I thought about information
Same experience here. It was like having the computer from the Starship Enterprise but it was right here and now and I got to use it. It’s been a long time since I felt that sense of wonder from anything in computing.
>"After failing to purchase rights to the text of the Encyclopædia Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia for its Encarta digital encyclopedia, Microsoft reluctantly used (under license) the text of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia for the first editions of its encyclopedia. This licensed text was gradually replaced over the following years with content Microsoft created itself.[7]"
A long time encyclopedia editor (who worked at Britannica, World Book, and Encarta) told me that door to door encyclopedia sales were dying well before Encarta. Due to the rise in two income couples, which radically narrowed the time window when you could get anyone to give you time at the door...
I see it as a Free Vs Paid Model, Wiki is Free, and it is good enough for most use cases. Encarta had a lot of licensing, and I doubt any of that will ever be free, but the quality of those articles inside Encarta or Britannica in many ways are still way ahead of Wiki.
I think it goes even beyond paid vs free; the wiki model of knowledgeable, caring volunteers doing all this work for free seemed pretty crazy to all but a very few. Curated collections like Encarta and encyclopedias also tended to have very cursory entries for all but the broadest and market-focused topics. IMO a biased article is better than no information at all. In the very least it gives us a starting point for discovery, discussion and improvement. Most of what we today take for granted started with a pretty one-sided viewpoint that gained attention and inclusiveness.
It's funny to think of it but CD-ROMs ... really were where all the multimedia was.
Outside professionals, not many people stored videos or audio on their PC in the early day, so all the multimedia type stuff, and to some extent including video games ... was all centered around the CD-ROM.
I used to gobble up all the super cheap "multimedia collection" type disks available at the time.
To some extent what made computers the multimedia place to be was the good old CD-ROM, well before the internet took it over.
There were earlier systems in the 1980s that combined PCs (or equivalent machines) with Pioneer LaserDisc systems (which could be controlled via a serial port) - a somewhat well known one was the BBC Domesday Project:
We have an old encyclopedia set - not Britannica though, from the 1910s or 1920s. I think it was my grandfather's originally, bought for father and uncles. Perhaps the generation earlier.
Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. On medicine, zoology and other sciences, it's occasionally surprising how we used to think. I'd periodically pick it up and read a few entries at random, and often disappear down a rabbit hole. At some point it stopped being obsolete and pointless to become fascinating history.
That's one thing Encarta could have been had it continued - a valuable snapshot of how thought and knowledge evolved. Always updated Wikipedia can and will never be that as sadly you can't snapshot a given date, and digging through edit histories is horribly unfriendly. We may have lost something there.
> I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story.
It was a killer app for CD-ROM, but for the title of the killer app I'd say DeLorme's "Street Atlas USA" had at least an equal claim.
I would almost say the -the- killer app for CD-ROM was Myst. I know I bought my second PC in 1994 (an Acer 486 DX2-50 with Vesa Local Bus graphics and a CD-ROM drive) just so I could play it (my previous machines as an adult were both Amigas).
You may be wondering why I say "second PC" - well, just before graduating high school my parents bought me a laptop, a Tandy 1100HD - which was technically my first PC. Later, after I had left home on my own, I bought an Amiga 2000, then an Amiga 1200, before getting the 486.
> It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate.
We actually asked them about this, IIRC - it turns out a lot of that stuff was licensed from third parties, and they weren't free to release it under a free content license, and didn't have the resources to sort out what was what.
Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out.
Encarta lasted from 1991-2009.
The iPod was introduced in 2001, saw sells start to fall off a cliff around 2009 and were all discontinued in 2017 - except for the iPod in name only iPod Touch. No one would say that the iPod was a failure. Encarta helped start the multimedia PC boom that helped make home computers more ubiquitous just like the iPod was Apple’s introduction to a wider audience.
Calling the iPad touch an iPad in name only is disingenuous. It’s 1/2 the price of the original and has more space etc. As to falling off a cliff, they sold significantly more iPods in 09, 10, and 11 than 06. They even sold more than 3x as many iPods in 2014 than 2004.
Apples watch is still a watch even if it does a lot of other things. Microsoft never ported Encarta functionality to anything after 09, it just died.
As a brand sure, but the iPhone has been a fair replacement for many people. I mean digital camera sales have dropped 84% since 2010, but if anything people are taking far more photos now.
For most people cellphones have mostly replaced watches, digital cameras, keychain flashlights, and MP3 players not because they are awesome at it but because having slightly better but largely redundant devices is not worth it. https://www.statista.com/chart/5782/digital-camera-shipments...
I appreciated this article. I agree that "Microsoft was never in it for the history."
Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives.
The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks.
CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail.
It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....
Wikipedia could do a better job integrating media.
I remember Encarta being pretty good about having video files showing the outlines of wars and battles... at least for the Vietnam War which is what I remember most. I prefer watching a video outline of wars and battles on youtube rather than dig right into a wall of text on wikipedia.
I still remember using one of the earliest Encarta versions and seeing a tiny postage stamp sized video animate and play some half broken wav file for the first time. I remember it hitting me like a baseball bat: we can do VIDEOS on computers now! This will change everything! TV is going to die because there are no ads on computers!
I spent a good five years online browsing the web before they decided to start adding advertising to everything. I never agreed to that switch in the contract.
Also things like the globe or the timeline mentioned in the article would be great to add to wikipedia. Being able to quickly pull up a timeline of battles mentioned on wikipedia that took place or involved a certain country could be neat. Similar things on the globe could illustrate a lot of things.
Yes. Part of the problem is the CC license restriction of Wikipedia/Wikimedia. A lot of primary sources such as the ones Encarta included were often proprietary licensed and copyrighted products. According to Wikipedia's annual donation bars they (supposedly) spend enough on hosting costs every year that spending money on licensing media content is (probably) out of the question for them.
I almost wish for a sort of intellectual property "eminent domain" promoting more things like famous news footage into the public domain where they fit an "almanac" need. Though I admit creating any sort of such program would be really hard to do, as the boundaries would be murky and it potentially would impact the revenue of companies and groups that generally need such revenue to survive (PBS, for example).
It's not reflected in OP's screenshot, but there was a period where Encarta (and a companion product called Microsoft Bookshelf) used a very flat, Swiss-design aesthetic that was catnip to graphic-designer-wanna-be kid me. You can draw a direct line from that era through Microsoft's Neptune UI experiments down to the Metro design language.
Here's a talk by Bill Flora who was a lead designer for many of the products along that line, from Encarta through to Windows Phone: https://vimeo.com/56764845
Odd anecdote, but my middle school had Encarta 2009 on all the computers and I spent a lot of time going through the historical location free roams finding bad geometry to glitch through walls.
I found out-of-bound clips in like 4 of them, and thought it was all very cool seeing all the level geometry and non-clearing graphics smearing across the screen. Probably contributed to my interest in computers and cybersecurity, ironically, no matter how much my teachers said it was a waste of time...
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadThat said, nostalgia is fun sometimes.
Ah, but does Wikipedia + Google have MindMaze?
I have been looking for 5+ years for a tablet or PC "Atlas" which can easily, with a click of button, show me graphs, or colour regions, based on specified criteria such as political types; economy; climate; productivity; and other interesting stats.
Wikipedia articles are horribly inconsistent about format and details they use for different geographic regions. They are even worse at showing overviews, especially across categories and regions. It takes me hours to gather info I'd get in Encarta in a few clicks, at which point I give up. Google Maps doesn't have any of these markings / mappings easily accessible; and neither is trivially accessible offline.
This is not to say Google Maps and Wikipedia aren't AWESOME - because they are; and I wouldn't dream of replacing them with Encarta for 99% of things. But there are significant use cases which have been lost and not replaced with anything of equal ease of use.
FWIW: I'd pay $50+ right now for a good off-line atlas. All I can find in app stores when I search for "Atlas" is scans of maps :S
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/
2017 version: 170 mb
2018 version: 1.6gb
I never used Encarta, so it might be great, but you can get better data today at the cost of being harder to use. But a lot less bias.
That said maps are cool, and they are still really expensive, even with http://openstreetmap.org and https://www.naturalearthdata.com
That entire time period is full of lost multimedia gems. From cooking CDs that had vetted recipes taught by professional chefs, to the Microsoft Wine Guide![1]
Sure now days all of that information is available on the web, but people have to sort through 90% garbage to find the good stuff. The number of recipes on the web put out by people who just don't even know how to cook is astounding.
There is something to be said for high quality curated experiences, and that is what those multimedia CD-ROMs offered.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzpNT8wAD3A
Using google was awesome before SEO.
I never really used Encarta deeply - I bought my Misumi CD-ROM reader in like 1994, without a bundle.
As a result, it was hard not to be in a bit of awe at how much information of various types you could suddenly have at home in the form of little silvery disks.
Google provides very shallow info and bites that give rise to information that is clever as opposed to well thought out.
I do not want to infer that they are bad resources, but I would argue that they are significantly lacking in the department of balanced, curated and well thought out information.
Sure, Wikipedia wins in sheer volume but that's it. Encarta was a well curated collection of knowledge that was consistent and perfectly suited for its audience.
More is not always better.
If you have an enormous amount of information, but know that some unknown 10% of that information is inaccurate (at a facts level, not just in a "I don't agree with the presentation or perspectives portrayed" way), that's dramatically worse than having slightly less information that you can be fairly sure has been (at least factually) verified.
Same with writing quality; a huge amount of information written in a way that your brain can't absorb efficiently (whether because it's in a foreign language, written incoherently, or interspersed with profanity and editorializing) is less useful and worse than less information written in a clear and consistent style.
That is not the correct use of "by definition." More only means more, not better.
purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658
-- Jorge Luis Borges
Wikipedia is unbeatable for breadth and depth, but there's a lot to be said for curation.
Encarta was much more interactive, even including 3D walk arounds of historical sites & quizzes.
I mean, I have plenty of my own tech nostalgia, like the way at 300 baud you could hear the bits and practically whistle them. Happy memories! But I try never to confuse that with "my childhood was a historical peak". Because it wasn't particularly.
You know plenty of people were just as nostalgic for their encyclopedia volumes and thought kids had it too easy with this CD-ROM nonsense. And I'm sure that people complained that the first encyclopedias made learning too easy, that kids wouldn't value what they didn't work for. And this is a tradition of "the kids are too soft" that goes back at least to Socrates: "[Writing things down] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own."
Excluding grammar and style maybe. A lot of Wikipedia, including many articles on important subjects, are painful to read. Either because they were written by committee or simply by somebody with poor language skills (sometimes even worse than my own!)
Sure, Wikipedia has more articles; but the content is of a significantly lower quality by every other standard going.
Source? Research papers on this subject don’t find a great difference in quality between Wikipedia and other encyclopedias.
The issue yourself and others who haven’t used Encarta is that you’re thinking about it as purely a text document store, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Encarta is more like a museum than it is like Wikipedia. It has a smaller curated set of write ups but has all the interactive exhibits, games, and multimedia content that a good museum has. Wikipedia is about breadth of content where as Encarta was about engagement.
This is something you’d expect the web to excel at but unfortunately the race to breadth of content has resulted in a less interesting delivery of said content.
I do have used Encarta, and I really enjoyed it. I felt like you were talking about pure content quality, when it was (as I understand) rather about the way that (good) content is presented. If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience? Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.
You probably just skimmed my post then because I’m really don’t know terms like “multimedia”, “games”, and phrases like “It wasn’t just a mass of text” could be confused with “pure content quality”.
> If one had the time and tools to make games and interactive interfaces from Wikipedia’s content, do you think it could eventually match the Encarta experience?
Absolutely. Encarta isn’t something that is unapproachable. In fact I literally said “This is something you’d expect the web to excel at” in my last comment :)
> Some WP articles have videos/sounds/gifs but I find them too rare.
Not only rare, poorly presented as well. Encarta has an engaging UI/UX, Wikipedia isn’t designed that way. So even the few articles with multimedia content are still less engaging than the average Encarta article.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. Sometimes people want their information presented in a bland broadsheet format, other times they want a pretty infograph. Each has their place.
I think it'd be really neat and useful for wikipedia to add things like that. A filterable searchable timeline to say "show me all the wars fought in or involving country X" or a map with layers showing different information or events.
What make you think Wikipedia would be more prone to these problems than other encyclopedia, including Encarta? Research has shown that the quality of Wikipedia is comparable to other encyclopedias, which might surprise some people given that anyone can edit it. Encarta will never have specialist in all domains known on Earth; something that Wikipedia can have.
Wikipedia is great, until you need to explain to children how to weigh the credibility of the information provided.
I'd also say that a monthly dump of Wikipedia to DVD/BluRay/USB would meet the offline requirements. Or as you say mobile phone internet access (for low bandwidth ... is WAP still a thing?)
I remember when our family first got Encarta, and I spent hour after hour reading and marvelling about how all this information could be so easily accessible! I think we had a 14k dial-up Internet connection at the time, and the web was barely getting started - I really had no idea how things would turn out!
I still remember the joy I had researching the Stegosaurus and the Platypus between my local library and my copy of Encarta for a school project <3.
Once some kid in my third grade class asked why race cars made noise they do when they passed, the teacher didn't give a satisfactory answer, and I was able to explain the Doppler effect to them based on animation I watched on Encarta.
Good stuff.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world...
(Enable Flash to make it slightly less cumbersome)
There was all of one or two internet providers in our county where I grew up at that time. Maybe one. We couldn’t afford it yet but my parents bought Encarta because it seemed like a wholesome tract for computer use.
I spent countless hours on there and used it for a ton of homework. IIRC my parents used it all the time as well. They likely still have the disks kicking around someplace.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e0Qelqp-Cc
Besides Encarta, the mid 90s where also the time where I was first able to buy satellite imagery on CR-ROM for all of Germany from my collected lunch money and years before Microsoft's TerraServer changed the world, which itself was long before Google Maps took over.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8q89q4/microsofts-terrase...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT-VbFcck6A
Although I do remember the hard geography questions very frequently just being "What is the county seat of (insert random US county)?"
Boy, my brother and I learned too much about Aardvarks (because they were the first item on the list).
Edit: I absolutely cannot stand the smarmy "I wrote code that you use" on his homepage. Sorry buddy, you probably don't.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=encarta&and[]=mediatype...
Before websites were really a thing, having your own multimedia CD-ROM to give out was some kind of status symbol!
I've started creating an offline reference library[1] because I see that search engines will be over whelmed with crap and frankly I don't want to have to find cell service to ask my handheld device to locate a factoid.
If you've read that now more than 50% of Google desktop searches don't result in a click, it is because Google is getting better at 'one boxing' the answer so you don't need to click through to read it.
[1] That project started by digitizing my referenced by less often used text books. Which lead to me digitizing text books for others as well. After Google's win on digitizing books is fair use for air cover much of the work applies NLP and a bit of machine learning to pull out facts which are not, in themselves copyrightable.
[2] "Google Wins Copyright Suit" --- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/04/18...
Another comment in this thread about having a tablet to do that suggests an interesting way to deploy something like this on inexpensive table hardware with a somewhat more bespoke (aka performant) OS and application architecture for appliance type operation. (think running a unikernel rather than a general purpose kernel in order to not spend cycles on things you won't ever need)
Since most of the text books I've scanned are hard covers I cut off the covers, scan those on flatbed scanner, then disassemble the binding to remove the pages. Cut off the margins to get to something closer to 8.5" wide (more modern text books have been "experimenting" with page sizes).
Disassembly takes about 20 minutes, scanning takes another, 10 minutes depending on how many sets I need to scan (the paper feeder for the ScanSnap is nominally 75 pages, but if it gets overloaded can misfeed). Occasionally I'll get a misfeed (two pages feed at the same time) and I generally clean the paper handling belts every 10 or 15 books because they get accumulation that make them less effective at gripping the paper.
Textbooks, are by their nature, more 'conduits of information' than works of art. (TAOCP not withstanding). Also they get regularly re-issued in order to be resold to students so their knowledge is more widely dispersed than many books.
When I was at Google I visited the book scanning operation a couple of times and they had these machines that would photograph a page, dewarp, and some of them even turn the page (some required a person to turn the pages). While I would love to have such a capability, the only way I could justify it would be to have texts I needed to add to my data set that were not mine to destroy.
My work-around for this issue so far has been to find and buy a second copy of a book on the used market to digitize, best of both worlds for me in that situation.
If you have a handful of precious books that you really can't bear to cut up, commercial non-destructive scanning services are available at ~$30 per book.
https://linearbookscanner.org/
https://www.diybookscanner.org/
Not ideal (IMO buying the physical book should entitle you to a zero marginal cost PDF copy too, which some publishers do adhere to) but certainly better than I expected.
They had to pick and choose what to go into depth on, but when they wanted to go into depth, they would hire the best writers in the field to explain everything really well. Issac Asimov penned more than one encyclopedia article, as did other science fiction authors.
I honestly learned most of my fundamental science knowledge from old 1950s and 1960s science fact books. Asimov in particular has multiple books that explain science really well, down to the level of nuclear fusion and fission, biochemistry, and a lot of other subjects, and I had a few other books in the same vein that were all really old, and really good.
I remember one book that was biographies of famous scientists, it went into depth about Marie Curry and her contributions to science. Reading that ~age 10 certainly impacted my views on gender equality and helped me believe that potential is not limited by gender.
Wikipedia, for all the great things about it, won't really do that. There isn't a Wikipedia page I can point literally anyone[2] at and say "read this and you'll understand the fundamentals of radiation and atomic physics".
I am sure such resources are out there on the web, but the odds of stumbling upon those resources at random is less than the odds of coming across a good science book at random in a thrift store.
That said there are some awesome YT science channels who have worked to fill this gap in quite well, but video sources are different than written sources, with each having their strength. (I read that short 10 or so page biography of Marie Curry probably a half dozen times, not going to do that with a YT video!)
[2] Where anyone is defined as "age 10 and up, with no mathematical background, who wants to be entertained while they read."
That's the entire point. I'm not the expert. Nor am I able to even understand the basics of which direction to read/learn - that's what the expert curators are for.
I dont have source at moment. But I remember reading a few years ago that wikipedia had fewer errors than most all encyclopedias on average.
There is definitely something to be said about consistency and clustering but on average I believe wikipedia is still the best in fewest errors.
Add to that, something like Encarta was curated by opinionated editors (whether or not you agree with them is different from the fact that the nature of content is different when it isn't trying to find consensus amongst absolutely everyone) and did not survive based on advertising as most internet content does today.
That set of factors made for a very different world of reading than today.
I was about to write this myself. Wikipedia has so much information that it’s easy to surf page to page, link out, etc, and end up having skimmed 50 articles and still not understand the thing you came to look at.
I was just overwhelmed by all the different software on offer, and would load up my bag with free samples and spec sheets for software I had no legitimate need for as a 10 year old, but I ate it all up. I would ride the BART home after, just pouring over my loot and being so excited to try the demos at home.
I went a few times after the internet took off, and it just wasn't the same. Who needs demos from an expo hall, when you can just download everything? There was nothing new to see at the hall, everything could be seen from your home just by visiting a url.
I love the world with the internet, but there certainly has been something lost.
It's nice that knowledge has become widely accessible with the Internet. The hard part I find now is knowing how to learn with so much access to information.
There was point in time where that truly felt like the future. Considering that we're now in the age of autoplaying, monetized "content" video nearly everywhere you go, it was nice to have only "primary source" video, aka stuff like the moon landing, or the MLK speech, instead of some nobody warbling on about its importance while splicing in stills of said video because they don't want to be in violation of the copyright.
The concept of finite, structured and bounded content is also extremely powerful in this era of overwhelming data, much of which rehashed and warmed over by various publications not to mention utterly infested with ads.
The concept of spending hours down a Wikipedia rabbit hole is not new, and it's one of the reasons I donate annually. But it first started with Encarta, and it's offline-only format has grown to be only more valuable as time goes on.
Start at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHol... and before I know it time has gone.
The USTR Special 301 Report already existed in 1998 and already singled out countries for possible trade sanctions for doing the kinds of things that permitted the US to develop economically in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I don't know if Argentina was already specifically targeted, though it was in later years, especially due to La Salada (Q.E.P.D.).
Even the VB5 bit is identical. Bought a 2-3$ Encarta copy from a random guy in a random store selling pirated CDs. I remember the guy sitting in his small shop, downloading stuff over Torrent and burning them to CDs. He had a machine with the most CD-writers I had ever seen in my life.
I loved flying over terrains in Encarta's terrain explorer (or whatever it was called, I didn't really understand English back then, perhaps even learned it through Visual Studio and Encarta). Whenever I was bored and kids do get bored often, I would get on Encarta, especially since Wikipedia wasn't a thing back then.
I wrote about this topic a few years ago (https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to speak up (I added some of his comments to the piece). There was a lot of back-room wheeling and dealing around digital encyclopedias during that era, much of it centered around Encarta—Microsoft acquired a lot of publishers during that period and it effectively disrupted most of the rest out of existence.
But even considering that, Encarta was special. I think Microsoft had the right idea—it was the killer app for CD-ROMs—though it turned out that the internet would only make it a temporary success story.
It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate.
Literally a week after getting Encarta a door to door encyclopedia salesmen came to our house and I showed him why I did not need his books. You could see the look of terror in his eyes.
That's an alien relic of an anecdote as there ever was.
The world has profoundly changed in the last twenty five years. Cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing has almost completely rewired society and changed business, jobs, dating, friendship, travel.
I really wonder what the next big changes will be. Cheap satellites in orbit and dramatically reduced LEO costs? Better battery tech? Advances in materials science? Human cloning and genetic modification? What modern trappings of the present time will feel used and dated in twenty years?
There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future already being here but not being evenly distributed seems appropriate.
The takeaways I get of this:
1. Exponentially-developing technology can pass you by quickly. The Internet went from exceedingly obscure to global in the ten years of the 1990s. Broadband wasn't ubiquitous by 1999, but it was increasingly available.
2. Standards matter. Even constructing a workstation that could handle reading Encarta was a challenge, and the tools to compose, render, and especially, present multimedia content (images, audio, video) were not common. Microsoft went the closed-source proprietary route, dooming them to the dustbin (though pieces were salvaged).
3. Standards are hard. Re-read above.
4. There are thresholds of utility that make or break things. I've been around infotech long enough (somewhat pre-dating the periods discussed here) that I've seen numerous technologies go from extreme cutting edge to widely adopted to passe. (And quite a few proposed but never gaining critical mass.) The reasons why any given tech fails right now are numerous. Luck plays a major role.
The present has exceptionally cheap bulk storage (my tablet has a 128GB removable microSD card for about $50), high-speed, ubiquitous, and wireless networking, and tools for sharding and distributing updated documents and file formats (git, rysnc, etc.). This makes distributed updatable large-scale works possible.
The technology of written works has undergone several seismic shifts, from clay tablet to papayrus roll to codex to moveable type. Less well-known (but only slightly) are the updatable formats: loose-leaf, three-ring, and replaceable bindings, all introduced in the late 19th century, which enabled updatable works. These were true "periodicals", where sections could be updated with amendments or replacements as information changed.
The database, digital file, early version control, Wiki, and distributed version control are, IMO, all legitimately novel forms of written works, which should be recognised as such. They have and will continue to change how content is created and used, and affects and interacts with society.
I can see your point that content outside a curated context replaces an encyclopedia to an extent, and up until about 5-10 years ago, as clickbait and black-hat SEO finally won out, much noncommercial Web content was at least informative, if of generally lower quality than traditional printed sources. Convenience has a huge edge over quality, though. These days, it's Wikipedia's curated content, especially for complex breaking news stories, that is my first go-to. After Idleword's (Maciej Cezglowski's) piece on Hong Kong hit HN last week, I finally took a look at Wikipedia's article on the protests there. A full 73 page long article with references on a protest movement only a couple of months old. That's staggering, and exceeds all but the very best news sources. (Another case I'd noted was the Oroville Dam case, where Brad Plumer's article for Vox was the only trad med piece I could find even remotely approaching Wikipedia's article. The first instance of this I recall was the 2004 Boxing Day quake/tsunami in Indonesia / Indian Ocean.)
Wikipedia, on the other hand, greatly enhances Web search, though it also benefits generally from the high profile resulting from that.
Wikipedia's crowdsourcing, the reliance on underlying technologies (Wiki, HTML, mediawiki markup), and on a huge set of organisational systems, standards, practices, and solutions Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation have arrived at, were transformational. Though those too strongly resemble the largely equivalent or analogous practices of earlier encyclopaedic efforts dating back to at least Diderot, as well as other reference works (OED, see Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman).
(Note: updated to add 2nd 'graph beginning "I can see your point...")
This confuses a number of different types of technology. For example, we haven't undergone a shift from codices -- we still use that form for all our written works today.
Clay and papyrus are materials on which text is written. Scroll and codex are physical forms in which long texts are organized. Movable type is a technology for recycling printing blocks. None of those three types of things are related to the other two, except that it's impossible to store clay as scrolls because it will dry. Clay is stored looseleaf.
Interestingly, the history of writing in the Near East shows exactly the same confusion -- a big reason written Aramaic grew more popular than Akkadian was that it was drawn on paper and Akkadian was carved into clay, despite the fact that logically nothing's stopping you from carving letters into clay or drawing cuneiform on paper.
Moveable type, cheap paper, mass literacy, vernacular language, typographic conventions, high-speed presses, and mass distribution, create a wholly different impact.
As Elizabeth Eisenstein noted, the printing press is an agent of social change. Generalised, all comms tech is.
So do scrolls. You're not supposed to open the entire scroll at once. The codex is better at this.
> but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy.
This is nonsense. You can prepare a very expensive book, but you don't have to. The idea that books were necessarily earth-shakingly expensive to create conflicts with the known reality of commercial popular novels in the ancient world.
This reminds me of the infamous Today show segment circa 1994.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A
What would that look like? An incompatible sister network that offers something the existing internet does not offer? A new network created after major disasters and world wide nuclear war destroy all existing infrastructure? I can’t imagine the existing internet would ever be replaced, certainly not by something offering privacy like ToR, because not enough people really care about privacy. The average person doesn’t really give a damn.
At some point we can optimize away the IP and TCP layers.
Google. Circa 2030.
"Replacement in what sense?" probably deserves exploration.
The underlying fundamental concepts of the Internet are 1) packet-switched (as opposed to through-circuit) communications, and inter-connected networks, via BGP.
There's a lot that's layered on top of this which is seen as fundamental, but is not entirely so, most especially end-to-end connectivity and universal point-to-point access. The Internet formed under tremendously different conditions than exist today, with only a handful of nodes through 1980, and even as late as the late 1980s only a few thousands.
Roughly each order-of-magnitude increases since then seem to have come with its own set of additional headaches and concerns, mostly regarding management and mitigation of abuse. The idea of guarded borders has long been seen as anathema. I see it as all but inevitable, and the question is whether that's done well or poorly.
There are a number of earlier networking ideas which might resurface or be adapted for new use, and a survey of history might be useful here. (John S. Quarterman's The Matrix, 1990, is a fascinating time-capsule exploration of these just at the cusp of the modern Internet -- the World Wide Web does not even make mention, though "The Web, a national Canadian nonprofit conferencing system formed in 1987, does.
I'd also look at uses of the Internet and user needs.
Fundamentally, digital networks serve as communications and control media. Whether or not these need to (or can be) segregated is an open question, but splitting off, say, the IoT from other communications, might make sense, along with SCADA and military communications -- all largely control networks.
Splitting out video and voice from text and data, likewise. Much of high-demand comes from those.
As the Internet heads from the first billion or two users to the remaining five or so, questions of what technology, interfaces, and devices are appropriate for a set of digital newcomers may be worth consideration.
Or, looking at this differently: the degree to which those already here may be interested in maintaining a separate space for themselves. Not that this is necessarily equitable, but it may well prove to be attractive, say, in particular to minimise fraud and other malicious use or attacks originating from the global poor, who are in many ways justified in wanting some of the pie that's been denied to, or taken from, them.
How the needs, wants, attractions, and/or detractors or aversions affect technology development and adoption remains to be seen.
Temps up 2°C, marine ecosystems collapse, and hundreds of millions of refugees?
Heretofor uninhabitable places such as ... greenland maybe?
Also, worth considering is that it is virgin territory for exploration for minerals and other goodies.
No shortage of water either.
But even all that aside, it is newly available space. If you can build a city in a desert (Phoenix, Arizona lets say) you can build one on Greenland.
As for soil, the creation of soil in Ireland and the UK took quite a bit of time.
They nailed the current temperature rise. No reason to think the rest of the extrapolated curve is wrong.
possibly https://skepticalscience.com/1982-exxon-accurate-prediction.... (totally unverified - lots of links to the sources though)
You'd think that universal access to all human knowledge would have remade society, but actually most of the humans don't really seem to care about knowledge. We got the Arab Spring, which turned into Daesh, the Syrian Civil War, and a new military dictatorship in Egypt. (And we got anti-vaxxers, global warming denialists, and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams.") Wikileaks didn't really move the needle on Obama's re-election. If cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing is rewiring the power structures of society, that's more because of Russian trolls and Twitter bots than anything else.
Probably the changes you're talking about will come. But I'm not convinced that it's a revolution that cute girls on the bus give me their Instagram instead of their phone number.
(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741592 for my thoughts on other, more positive possibilities of modern informatics.)
Some do, but I can get dollars from the US into most European currencies for less than .5%.
We've come a long way from the '90s.
Revolut will also allow you to move 5K GBP per month without any fees[1].
[0] https://transferwise.com/gb/borderless/pricing#conversion_fe... [1] https://www.revolut.com/legal/fees/#exchange
For the majority of people, however, things have changed little.
Could you not do this before? Just book a plane ticket at the airline desk and ask for an empty room once you arrive at a hotel?
It might sound pretty awkward these days of pathetic instagram 'celebrities', but actually makes things like backpacking in the middle of nowhere much, much better experience. The magic is still out there
The other things he said are mostly true. Here in Buenos Aires I've never owned a car, but that has more to do with being a huge megalopolis than anything else.
Even in poor countries Facebook and cheap instant communication like WhatsApp have rewired the way people socialize and stay in touch.
This is mostly a response to the commenter before you, except your last sentence.
A budget flight to the continent and a week in an AirBnB in Europe can cost as little as a few hundred quid. Something that was only really available to the rich, or at least the very well off, is now available to almost anyone.
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/global-income-distribu...
I moved to London last year and have used cash roughly zero times since. Visiting my parents (outside London) is like jumping in to treacle. Finding coins for the bus? Paper tickets on the train? Give me a god damn break. Even using chip and pin is weird now since almost all my purchases, except for dining out, are either touchless, online, or via mobile app.
In 20 years i think cash (banknotes, coinage), and maybe even bank accounts as we know them today, will be an almost alien concept to kids. Brick and mortar banks will be gone entirely. I certainly haven't set foot in one over a decade.
Don't have a safety deposit box with precious metals and jewels inside?
Many, many people do - among other items (guns, cash, drugs, etc).
While "brick and mortar" banks may not exist, something of the same nature will - some kind of high-security place to store stuff like that, away from home. Maybe it will also be combined with some kind of networked backup storage for data as well...
To an extent, places like this do exist - private vault companies; always have.
I guess my point is that physical banks offer other services which can't be replicated virtually.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
Give this a try, go open and put some rock in your safe deposit box, then call the bank and tell them you placed a C4 explosive in the box and will detonate it if they dont deposit gold under a park-bench in 2 days time.
Then watch how safe your safety deposit box is.
I live in backwards South Africa, and even I can't remember the last time I needed to use cash. So I'm totally with you on that one.
But bankless? Eh, I think we are at least two or tree decades away from that.
And, yes, I seem to recall the price was something in the $500-$1000 ballpark. Which was definitely a lot of money in the early 70s(?) when I got it--and, yes, the salesman came to the house.
Same here! The knowledge was obsolete but the memories of my childhood were a part of it. I eventually recycled most of them after I last moved but there are a few books I still have somewhere.
A few years ago, during a move,I finally parted with the set my parents had gotten in the late 60s or early 70s. It was painful, but I had to really downsize at the time.
I still have my 1911 edition, which I can't get rid of, even if I haven't cracked a volume in a couple of years.
One word for Encarta and the like: Edutainment.
I think subscribing to that was one of the best things my parents ever did for my education. Over the course of my youth I devoured it several times and credit it to my earliest exposure to countless subjects that they'd never touch at school.
One of the most notable things about The Joy of Knowledge was the extraordinary explanatory art. One day I will have to find my books and make some scans.
Looking up things in the card catalog, and on microfiche at my local library, was as much fun as locating the book itself. Sometimes, in the course of searching the catalog, I'd come across other books that sounded interesting, so I would write down those call numbers, too.
Or browsing microfiche roll magazines and newspapers - high speed fast forward and reverse, then for 10 cents a page (!) pop off a copy to take home.
That is one part I don't miss - having to pay for photocopies...
Same experience here. It was like having the computer from the Starship Enterprise but it was right here and now and I got to use it. It’s been a long time since I felt that sense of wonder from anything in computing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fRX4R6MY4A
:)
Amusingly, many of the articles in Encarta were copied verbatim from there.
>"After failing to purchase rights to the text of the Encyclopædia Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia for its Encarta digital encyclopedia, Microsoft reluctantly used (under license) the text of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia for the first editions of its encyclopedia. This licensed text was gradually replaced over the following years with content Microsoft created itself.[7]"
It came with a parallel port dongle -not mentioned in the box copy- to ensure that the precious was not shared.
It did not work right, and I was cured of buying that stuff.
Outside professionals, not many people stored videos or audio on their PC in the early day, so all the multimedia type stuff, and to some extent including video games ... was all centered around the CD-ROM.
I used to gobble up all the super cheap "multimedia collection" type disks available at the time.
To some extent what made computers the multimedia place to be was the good old CD-ROM, well before the internet took it over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
An early glimpse of the future, somewhat.
Whilst it's not especially useful in today's world, it's a fascinating relic, especially on trades and skills that have declined or died out. On medicine, zoology and other sciences, it's occasionally surprising how we used to think. I'd periodically pick it up and read a few entries at random, and often disappear down a rabbit hole. At some point it stopped being obsolete and pointless to become fascinating history.
That's one thing Encarta could have been had it continued - a valuable snapshot of how thought and knowledge evolved. Always updated Wikipedia can and will never be that as sadly you can't snapshot a given date, and digging through edit histories is horribly unfriendly. We may have lost something there.
Same for me. My grandfather was a teacher and I saved quite a few of the old school/teaching books after he died.
Did you know that the Empire State Building is the highest building on earth?
Well, it was, when these books were printed. :-)
It was a killer app for CD-ROM, but for the title of the killer app I'd say DeLorme's "Street Atlas USA" had at least an equal claim.
You may be wondering why I say "second PC" - well, just before graduating high school my parents bought me a laptop, a Tandy 1100HD - which was technically my first PC. Later, after I had left home on my own, I bought an Amiga 2000, then an Amiga 1200, before getting the 486.
We actually asked them about this, IIRC - it turns out a lot of that stuff was licensed from third parties, and they weren't free to release it under a free content license, and didn't have the resources to sort out what was what.
Encarta lasted from 1991-2009.
The iPod was introduced in 2001, saw sells start to fall off a cliff around 2009 and were all discontinued in 2017 - except for the iPod in name only iPod Touch. No one would say that the iPod was a failure. Encarta helped start the multimedia PC boom that helped make home computers more ubiquitous just like the iPod was Apple’s introduction to a wider audience.
Apples watch is still a watch even if it does a lot of other things. Microsoft never ported Encarta functionality to anything after 09, it just died.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quart...
Note FYQ1 is calendar quarter 4.
For most people cellphones have mostly replaced watches, digital cameras, keychain flashlights, and MP3 players not because they are awesome at it but because having slightly better but largely redundant devices is not worth it. https://www.statista.com/chart/5782/digital-camera-shipments...
The iPod’s time had passed and the iPod Touch could just as well be called an iPad Nano. It’s more of an iPad than iPod.
Felt the same way with IE until Mozilla came along after Netscape died.
Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives.
The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks.
CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail.
It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....
I remember Encarta being pretty good about having video files showing the outlines of wars and battles... at least for the Vietnam War which is what I remember most. I prefer watching a video outline of wars and battles on youtube rather than dig right into a wall of text on wikipedia.
I almost wish for a sort of intellectual property "eminent domain" promoting more things like famous news footage into the public domain where they fit an "almanac" need. Though I admit creating any sort of such program would be really hard to do, as the boundaries would be murky and it potentially would impact the revenue of companies and groups that generally need such revenue to survive (PBS, for example).
In a way, this phrasing also works.
I found out-of-bound clips in like 4 of them, and thought it was all very cool seeing all the level geometry and non-clearing graphics smearing across the screen. Probably contributed to my interest in computers and cybersecurity, ironically, no matter how much my teachers said it was a waste of time...