CD ROM encyclopedias were only really viable when dial up speeds limited the amount of multimedia content on the internet. Both Microsoft and Britannica were victims of internet encyclopedias. And now static internet based encyclopedias are themselves under threat of personalised AI content as well. The pursuit of knowledge keeps changing what knowledge itself looks like.
I still have my boxed copy of Encarta 2001. The interactive world atlas was the best feature! Miles ahead of everything at the time. Multiple layers of stats from population to weather to languages etc https://youtu.be/zsbShjlh6xk?si=4U47LILUmKPfXgPY&t=320
I kind of wish these fixed large encyclopedia were still going in 2019 to capture a pre AI corpus.
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.
Ahh AoK is such an amazing game! I kind of want to download it now. I was never very good at it as a kid, spent _way_ too much time building my own campaigns with triggers (this was in the early days before I had discovered programming languages) - obviously no-one ever actually played these.
Tried it removing the pixelated in the Dev tools. It looks like an old Win32 app running on 150% or 200% HiDPI scaled Windows with slightly blurry text. In any case much better than irregular pixelated scaling.
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...
This makes me raise the question whether it's possible to view wikipedia as per ...? I know i can go back per article - but can I browse wikipidea as it was in 2005?
No. This is technically insurmountable. The main obstacles involve the fact that templates and their formatting has changed drastically, and also the media that is stored on Commons has also changed commensurately.
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.
CD ROM encyclopedias were only really viable when dial up speeds limited the amount of multimedia content on the internet. Both Microsoft and Britannica were victims of internet encyclopedias. And now static internet based encyclopedias are themselves under threat of personalised AI content as well. The pursuit of knowledge keeps changing what knowledge itself looks like.
I got carried away and started playing the Age of Empires Demo from the desktop after I exited Encarta
Glad to see I'm not the only one who immediately ditched an opportunity to learn for AoE. It lures like a siren's song.
it is amazing that you can emulate win 95 on a browser tab and play win 95 video games like it's 1998.
It goes to show how actually powerful modern hardware is, and how much of it is squandered by modern software.
Back to prompting now.
Me too
I still have my boxed copy of Encarta 2001. The interactive world atlas was the best feature! Miles ahead of everything at the time. Multiple layers of stats from population to weather to languages etc https://youtu.be/zsbShjlh6xk?si=4U47LILUmKPfXgPY&t=320
I kind of wish these fixed large encyclopedia were still going in 2019 to capture a pre AI corpus.
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.
Ahh AoK is such an amazing game! I kind of want to download it now. I was never very good at it as a kid, spent _way_ too much time building my own campaigns with triggers (this was in the early days before I had discovered programming languages) - obviously no-one ever actually played these.
What a throwback. Right back to writing "book reports" in middle school.
Immediately jumped straight to MindMaze.
The first thing I looked for as well. The nostalgia.
Just checked, the Soundgarden clip is in its proper place on the Rock Music article. Fantastic work.
Nice! Here’s the permalink for “Rock Music” (it’s funny how this is implemented)
https://benwinding.github.io/encarta_95_web/#/article/Rock%2...
The very first program I ever used on my father's PC, and would constantly get stuck playing Mind Maze for hours.
Holy memories of the family computer in the living room batman!
The text looks very weird on my PC, see: https://imgur.com/a/vAMVHc7
isn't that how it looked at the time?
Yes and no. It was pixelated, not irregular and ugly. Here is bad quality rescaling at work.
Fuck me, OP's a moron... the VM's "monitor" is set to 1024x768.
The output canvas has width="1024" height="768", but the CSS:
#screen_container canvas, #screen_container > div {
}overwrites it, making everything be upscaled...
It would look fine upscaled if only no one added the CSS rule "image-rendering: pixelated"
Tried it removing the pixelated in the Dev tools. It looks like an old Win32 app running on 150% or 200% HiDPI scaled Windows with slightly blurry text. In any case much better than irregular pixelated scaling.
No, of course not.
Wait, it even features a windows 95? nice easter egg
It is loading a Windows 95 VM (using https://copy.sh/v86/) and runs an actual copy of Encarta 95 there, yeah.
OP wrote: "difficult task"...
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...
and includes AoE 2 :D
And PovRay, Super Pi and some other stuff...
Actually, I didn't know that one could ship a pre-booted OS inside the emulator.
This makes me raise the question whether it's possible to view wikipedia as per ...? I know i can go back per article - but can I browse wikipidea as it was in 2005?
No. This is technically insurmountable. The main obstacles involve the fact that templates and their formatting has changed drastically, and also the media that is stored on Commons has also changed commensurately.
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.
The mouse hijack feels really weird
It's because it's basically a fully emulated PC running Windows 95. It's not a recreation of Encarta for the web, which would me much nicer IMHO.
I wish there were an option to keep the native cursor, the captured cursor doesn't work with my browser.
Oh God I remember running this on my dad's computer which had the first CD-ROM drive I had seen. I felt like I was in a spaceship
I remember the CD drive on the school computer took CDs in a big case with a floppy like opening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)
the problem i have is the mouse control is weird.
It does not work at all for me (touchpad/Firefox/Linux).
did civilisation peak with encarta
wow blast from the past. I do beleive this exact version prob in exactly 95 was the first CD I ever inserted into a CD rom. lots of fun!
Oh, that's very nostalgic, even though I only got acquainted with Encarta in the 2000s
Straight to Mind Maze for me!
(Mouse is VERY touchy though)
Mind Maze yesssssssssssss
NICE - thank u