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.