On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 1:48 AM, Maria Fanucchi marialadouce@gmail.com wrote:
RIP Encarta. For better or for worse, it was for many people, especially children, the first encyclopedia they ever encountered. It may eventually have sparked the interest of, and inspired, more than a few Wikipedians.
The first encyclopedia I encountered was a supermarket set, published by Grolier I think, made available one volume per week in 1991. Every grocery trip, my mother would buy me the next volume, and in a box somewhere I still have the complete set—in fact, I used them to fact-check some of my earliest Wikipedia articles, back when we were still creating pages about the commonest of things, any new content was a positive contribution, and we weren't quite so strict about citing sources.
A few years later, my parents bought a copy of one of the first editions of Encarta, distributed on a single CD-ROM. "Multimedia" was still a buzzword, and having audio sprinkled throughout—even video, for select topics—was an amazing thing. I grew up in an anti-Microsoft household, and we ran Encarta under IBM OS/2, but despite my prejudice, I couldn't help but find Encarta the greatest thing ever. I was disappointed when I had read every article in less than a week, but the proof of concept was there. (I don't think I need to wax nostalgic any further; obviously, long story short, I got here.)
So, yes, I do have some nostalgia for Encarta. Its day is long gone, and this is certainly overdue, but I've never really harbored any ill will toward it.
Let's hope some of their material can be released (I'm hoping specifically for some of the multimedia, such as snippets of music made with rare instruments, and the sound files of letters, numbers and various phrases said in many languages, by native speakers).
I second that. Even now, when I think about Encarta, the first thing that comes to mind is a recording they had of a Baroque piece played on the harpsichord. (Not that that's rare, but they did do a great job deciding what pieces warranted multimedia presentation, and they had some good ones.)
Austin