#Microsoft encarta dictionary upgrade#
#Microsoft encarta dictionary Pc#
#Microsoft encarta dictionary series#

It also had much more visual menus with dark backgrounds, about 20 years before 'dark mode' became a trend.Įncarta '95 had much nicer menus than Wikipedia ever did.Īround that time, Encarta started to be bundled with computers that were marketed as a 'Multimedia PC,' which at the time meant having a video card that supported 65K colors and a 640 x 480 resolution, a sound card capable of CD-quality output, a CD-ROM drive capable of reading 300KB/s, a 25 MHz processor, 4MB of RAM, and a 160 MB hard drive.

#Microsoft encarta dictionary upgrade#

For those who were tired of Solitaire and Minesweeper, it was the closest thing to a video game that could be played in the school library.Įncarta '95 was a big upgrade on the visual front using menus with dark backgrounds, about 20 years before 'dark mode' became a trend.Įncarta '95, released in late 1994, was a big upgrade on the visual front, from higher-quality videos to more refined MindMaze artwork.

#Microsoft encarta dictionary series#

You wouldn't even need an internet connection to get an experience similar to that of Wikipedia.Ī staple of the series was the MindMaze mini-game, which was a trivia game with a maze as a framing device and beautiful artwork. The Atlas would let you zoom in on regions, countries and states, like a more static version of Google Earth. Other Encarta features were inspired by its competitors: the Timeline would show events, inventions and nations in a chronological order. Another way Wikipedia later resembled those versions was the generic, text-only menus with light-grey and white backgrounds. The price was never raised again, and the 1994 Edition was quickly released.īut what made the early versions of Encarta more attractive than a printed encyclopedia? The same things that make Wikipedia appealing today: you could search for articles by name or category, or search article contents.Īrticles had a list of contents, a gallery of related media, and links to other articles. By the end of the year, it had become the best-selling CD encyclopedia with 350,000 copies. Nearing the end of 1993, Microsoft Encarta pricing was reduced to $99 for the holiday season. While Compton's and Grolier offered steep discounts to owners of previous versions, it had no chance to gain a significant market share. Having failed to acquire the rights to Encyclopaedia Britannica or the World Book Encyclopedia, Encarta was released in early 1993, based on the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia, for the same price as its competitors. Microsoft was late to the party with its own encyclopedia. The VGA standard was the key for showing photos and video on a computer screen. By 1992, both the New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia and Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia included video for $395. On the first day of 1990, Britannica released Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia, with speeches, music and 'animated images' (it was still too early for video), for $895, or $200 more than the print version.

#Microsoft encarta dictionary Pc#

Two important developments came in the late 1980s: sound cards, which allowed any PC to play audio that didn't sound like a series of beeps, and the Video Graphics Array (VGA) display standard, which supported up to 256 colors at the same time (just enough for GIF images). It sounded like a bargain compared to the $650 print version, but a CD-ROM player alone would cost more than that at the time. Grolier quickly issued a text-only version of the Academic American Encyclopedia for $200. In 1985, the CD-ROM was announced, offering hundreds of megabytes of read-only memory in a compact disc format.

The CD-ROM was the innovation that made it possible. If you had no idea where the information you were looking for was located, it could take you a while to find it. In the 1990s, the internet was smaller, slower, and harder to search, with Google only popularizing automated page ranking in 1998. If you wanted to continue reading on a subject that was briefly mentioned in the article, you'd usually need to get a different volume at best or a different book at worst. It also wouldn't include audio or video, relying on verbal descriptions of movements and sounds. Can you imagine (or remember) living in a world without Wikipedia? If you wanted to know the basic facts on a given topic, what would you do? You could get a physical encyclopedia, but after you did, it couldn't be updated or corrected.