Microsoft Encarta
The CD-ROM encyclopedia that killed the twenty-volume set on the shelf. Encarta turned book reports into a multimedia experience — clickable maps, audio clips of national anthems and animal sounds, video snippets — and hid the MindMaze trivia game inside for when you were supposed to be studying.
Microsoft launched Encarta in 1993 under the codename "Gandalf." It wasn't written from scratch: after Britannica turned Microsoft down, the first edition was built on the text of Funk & Wagnalls, later folding in Collier's and other encyclopedias. Sold on a stack of CD-ROMs (and later a single DVD), it cost $395 at release, soon dropped to $99, and — crucially — was frequently bundled free with new family PCs, putting it on millions of home computers.
What made it magic to a '90s kid was the multimedia. Where a paper encyclopedia gave you text and a photo, Encarta let you click a map, hear an anthem play, watch a short video, and play the MindMaze word game in the corner. By 2008 the Premium edition held more than 62,000 articles, 25,000 images, and over 300 videos.
Then the web caught up. Free, ever-expanding Wikipedia (launched 2001) and Google search made a fixed disc feel obsolete, and Microsoft pulled the plug: Encarta was discontinued in 2009, with the MSN Encarta site closing on October 31, 2009 and the companion dictionary lingering until 2011. For a generation, though, "just look it up on Encarta" was how homework got done.
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