So my mom (I have been living with my parents since the onset of the pandemic) got a dumpster a few days ago. There were some disks littering the bottom from before it came to us. Today I saw an old compact disk in its protective insert, and brought it in to see if I could read the data.
I now have, tucked away on a Windows 7 VM on my modern Linux desktop, an installed copy of a Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia … from 1992, the same year I was born.
Initial thoughts: it’s fascinating even at this level, simply as an artifact of the time. The thing is a grand total of 433 MB in size, and the articles I’ve read are tiny compared to modern versions. The multimedia is primitive, and the about page for the program, for reasons probably obvious to everyone here, doesn’t list a website. Yet … it’s the same age as me, and if I had been maybe a decade older I would probably have been begging my parents to get me this for Christmas on my 10th birthday.
@mathlover Lol. Maybe still a too new a concept in 1992. ;)
Is it case insensitive?
@trinsec Let me double-check.
@trinsec Nope. Lower-case “internet” doesn’t get any results.
@trinsec Nor does “web” for anything related to the modern Web. The history of technology entries refer to the “web of food production” that artisans weren’t involved in during the Middle Ages and the “web of technical innovation” during the Industrial Revolution.
@mathlover www probably doesn’t exist at all I bet. Mmm… network… ARPA?
@trinsec Nothing for ARPA, and I posted the article on computer networking earlier. It’s only 3 paragraphs long.
@mathlover Mmm.. nodes…
Reminds me of echomail networks and FIDOnet… Which sounds about right. I was heavily into echomail networks at that time too.
@mathlover I used this and the large book collections when I was a kid! Crazy the disk lasted this long. Great find...
@friday Thanks! I remember having the Grolier encyclopedia set growing up, but I think the only encyclopedia I remember was Encarta.
@mathlover yup Encarta and Encycolopedia Britannica - they also had a software version
@friday I was a lot more familiar with the Compton disk version of their atlas. I am extremely nostalgic just thinking about that.
@mathlover never tried that one. Will have to find a collection somewhere and check this old things out again
@mathlover I remember the Grolier encyclopedia. I think my school had either the 91 or the 92 edition, on CD for Acorn Archimedes. It was about the only CD the school had (we had so few, that it was a caddy-based drive and we had enough caddies to keep the CDs in them.
Didn't use hte multimedia much though, that was more the case with Encarta95, which came with my first windows PC
When it came to actual disk programs, the first encyclopedia program I was given was a Microsoft Kids program. I think it was called "Explorapedia". It had a frog as a sort of guide and had songs in it as well.
Nice seeing you on Mastodon, by the way!
I think I’ll post images here. Here’s the article on computer networking: