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Comment by cpitman | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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