This takes me back, and points out something people today probably don't fully appreciate.
In 1993, Edutainment was the promise of computers. We had an old XT that my sister took to college that fall, and we were shopping for a 486. Encarta and National Geographic CD-ROM based titles were everywhere. Every demo in every computer store let you play with these seemingly-limitless repositories of information. It was mind-blowing -- complete with short postage stamp videos for select subjects!
It would be fascinating to look back at all of the titles available, but rich multimedia was finally here, and it died as quickly as it had arrived, as people moved to AOL, CompuServe, and the Internet instead.
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.
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.
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.
Encarta, Carmen Sandiego, Kids Typing, and Gizmos & Gadgets. It was the perfect confluence of events - I spent hours of time on these and might have actually learned something.
Slightly related, in Junior High, most boys in my class knew absolute zero − 273.15 figure by heart as if we discovered it and we got it from Saint Seiya. Used well you can convey extremely strong knowledge to young kids.
Only Microsoft product I bought from a shelf was Encarta 97. It was ok, but the main thing I remember from that is 1) some beatles thumbnails videos 2) macromedia flash based
In 1993, Edutainment was the promise of computers. We had an old XT that my sister took to college that fall, and we were shopping for a 486. Encarta and National Geographic CD-ROM based titles were everywhere. Every demo in every computer store let you play with these seemingly-limitless repositories of information. It was mind-blowing -- complete with short postage stamp videos for select subjects!
It would be fascinating to look back at all of the titles available, but rich multimedia was finally here, and it died as quickly as it had arrived, as people moved to AOL, CompuServe, and the Internet instead.