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.
@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 Lol. Maybe still a too new a concept in 1992. ;)
Is it case insensitive?