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 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.