benwinding.github.io
The way this works is the most convoluted, nonsense and brittle system ever... but it works as a statically hosted gh-pages site!
Please note: All the material on this site is freely available through the internet archive (see github readme)
Github repo -> https://github.com/benwinding/encarta_95_web
You goto the article for "Orbit" and under "Laws of Motion", click "Orbit Interactivity" and then click the large graphic that appears to launch the interactive applet.
As a young person I sat and went through every article looking for these little interactive applets. This was my favorite for some reason.
Another fun tidbit is, in the '95 version, if you send the moon into the Earth, it just bounces off. In, I believe, the 1996 version, they updated it- to I think a generic red colored planet and gray moon (if my memory after 30 years is correct) and if you send the moon into the planet, it would explode!
Yeah. I spent a lot of time with these CD-rom's.
The hurt themselves badly by imposing a really annoying paywall just as Wikipedia was beginning to take off. A hybrid model with tiered access (maybe even a limited ad-supported free tier) might well have kept them on top - instead, they offered only a single expensive annual plan priced to compete with the paper or CD editions.
So what is it? I genuinely wonder. Maybe just the style of the visuals, a throwback to when a written piece of content online "mattered" more, as it represented something more, too.
It may not matter, but distinguishing what captivates and what naturally glosses seems like it may matter greatly in a space suffused by content.
But I suppose that would pre-COVID too.
Still I'd quite have liked something like that.
Some have suggested a Wikipedia snapshot which can be browsed locally - not bad but not the same vibe as curated professionally written Encarta or Britannica.
https://benwinding.github.io/encarta_95_web/#/article/Rock%2...
It's just a crappy render of a Windows VM's display, in all it's upscaled pixelated glory, it's not even doing anything webby like a Javascript engine that decodes whatever database Encarta used and rendered the data in crisp HTML.
If they had asked AI to do all the above, I'd be more impressed than this (I'm guessing) human-made slop...
(For example, there’s some URL magic going on -- articles you open show up in the fragment portion, e.g. #/article/Art -- which is non-trivial considering you have to pass that information into the VM and back.)
Actually, I didn't know that one could ship a pre-booted OS inside the emulator.
All that rich interactive reference material at your fingertips, offline, was an absolute joy.
It is not nearly enough to simply view an old revision from 21 years ago. It would be replete with broken templates, broken formatting, redlinks, and missing images, at the very least. And that applies to every single article, across the board, no matter what its content. The more comprehensive the article, the more broken it would look.
(Mouse is VERY touchy though)