Hacker News Reader

Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

This takes me back, and points out something people today probably don't fully appreciate.

In 1993, Edutainment was the promise of computers. We had an old XT that my sister took to college that fall, and we were shopping for a 486. Encarta and National Geographic CD-ROM based titles were everywhere. Every demo in every computer store let you play with these seemingly-limitless repositories of information. It was mind-blowing -- complete with short postage stamp videos for select subjects!

It would be fascinating to look back at all of the titles available, but rich multimedia was finally here, and it died as quickly as it had arrived, as people moved to AOL, CompuServe, and the Internet instead.

View on HN

I sunk a ton of time into Encarta as a kid. In some ways, it still seems superior to Wikipedia.

I remember replaying that cheetah video, Neil Armstrong’s “one small step...” and that gravity interactive countless times

I think these may be the two videos you are referring to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEH-HxLJtBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4t2g37DAcQ

Basketball too :)

Mindmaze. That's all I have to say.

Is there anything like that today?

Not that I know of.

The demise of CD-ROM as a format and later the .com bust probably had a fair bit to do with the education software market getting reshaped in weird ways. I was a freshman in HS in '01 so at that point I was far enough away from that kind of stuff that I never really found out how it ended up.

Similar story for me. My school didn't have anything like a geography class, but my wandering around Encarta 95 was probably a suitable replacement.

I spent so many hours on that. I remember a later version of Encarta absolutely nerfing it though, and I have no idea why.

Microsoft's CD-based movie encyclopedia product, Cinemania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cinemania), was similarly excellent. In terms of presentation, Cinemania 97 was far superior to IMDB as it is 20 years later.

Seeing Alec Guinness (as Ben Kenobi) get cut down by David Prowse in a little 320x240 window :)

Man, those were the days...

I completely forgot about that, you brought some great memories! It really seems like those curated educational/reference/edutainment(?) products were, in some ways, better than interwebz we have today. Microsoft was really good at that game. Even on the internet. I wonder what they're up to now, will have to check out. There was this site they did, I think as a part of demonstration of terraserver, where they made an online sky map with deep zoom functionality. It was impressive at the time. Googling turns out nothing - maybe I should try with Bing.

However, english wikipedia is probably one of the most important, if not THE most important invention internet has brought us. Such a wealth of information and all as a free access. I've dreamt of such thing in our future back then, and now we have it.

Just seeing the word 'Encarta' which I probably haven't thought about or encountered in the past decade is just bringing back a flood of nostalgia.

Edutainment was always a critical part of the sales pitch from children to their parents trying to get a computer to play games on.

Encarta, Carmen Sandiego, Kids Typing, and Gizmos & Gadgets. It was the perfect confluence of events - I spent hours of time on these and might have actually learned something.

Slightly related, in Junior High, most boys in my class knew absolute zero − 273.15 figure by heart as if we discovered it and we got it from Saint Seiya. Used well you can convey extremely strong knowledge to young kids.

The Carmen Sandiego game taught me terrible puns!

The first time I ever saw the Hidebburg footage was from a postage stamp sized video on a CD encyclopedia (not Encarta) that came with our CD drive.

Same here. For my family it was the copy of Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia that came bundled with our Mac Performa.

Multimedia - now there's a word I haven't heard in so long :)

Only Microsoft product I bought from a shelf was Encarta 97. It was ok, but the main thing I remember from that is 1) some beatles thumbnails videos 2) macromedia flash based

Reply on news.ycombinator.com