Remember the Encarta 'So, you wanna play some Basketball' Video?Īmazed by Google Earth? You never saw the globe in Encarta. In a world of 4k streaming video, global wireless, and high-speed everything, there's really no analog to the feeling we got watching the Moon Landing as a video in Encarta - short of watching it live on TV in 1969! For most of us, this was the first time we'd ever seen full-motion video on-demand on a computer in any sort of fidelity - and these are mostly 320x240 or smaller videos!Ī generation of us grew up hearing MLK's 'I have a dream' speech inside Microsoft Encarta! Today, my kids just assume that the sum of all human knowledge is available with a single search or a 'hey Alexa' so the world's mysteries are less mysterious and they become bored by the Paradox of Choice. The scope of knowledge was overwhelming, but accessible. I spent hours and hours just wandering around random articles in Encarta. We could barely believe that a whole bookshelf of Encyclopedias was now in our pockets. My kids can't possibly intellectualize the scale that data exists in today.

Even a $5 USB stick could hold Encarta - twice! The idea that Encarta was so large that it was 5 CD-ROMs (!) was staggering, even though that's just a few gigs today. CD-ROMs could bring us 700 MEGABYTES which was unbelievable when compared to the 1.44MB (or even 120KB) floppy disks we were used to. I recently found a disk and was impressed that it installed just perfectly on my latest Window 10 machine and runs nicely.Įncarta existed in an interesting place between the rise of the internet and computer's ability to deal with (at the time) massive amounts of data.

Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had.

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