RIP: Microsoft Encarta

TBH, I never knew encarta, till there was Wikipedia.. :P

The computer marginalized the encyclopedia – who has room for all those volumes anyway

Bought Encarta 1994 from EggHead in New Jersey. Used it once or twice. Recently acquired a copy of Microsoft Student to use for college but was required to use university resources for all research so Encarta on MS Student didn’t get used either.

Encarta was fun back when I had a 4x cd-rom drive and a 1.18 gig hard drive with 8 mb of ram…

This certainly takes me back. I honestly thought they dismantled it a long time ago. Talk about not knowing your customer base. Most of the time when a company lays an egg they get rid of it. Well, at least Microsoft can now use the rotten egg as lawn fertilizer. Makes me think. What else do they have that they need to discard?

Well around 15 years ago Encarta was an amazing resource of info, on one disc! At the time we didn’t have the net. As you know with the net you can search for everything, with just a click of a button ( No cd’s required) Rip

We used to use it in my school and oh my god it was awful. They refuse to let us use Google and Wikipedia like normal people!

Put that in your Funk & Wagnall’s!

That of course, is a line from “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In”.
And Funk & Wagnall’s Encyclopedia was bought by MS & turned into Encarta!
MS also bought Collier’s Encyclopedia.

I have also had Encarta discs for a very long time but never used them. However this harkens back to a different age (pre-Wikipedia and pre-internet resources like Britannica in general really). Although I – like so many others – have never used my copies of Encarta either, there was a time when that was one of the most comprehensive references available for Windows. It certainly had it’s day and should be recognized for being what it was when it did… not unlike AOL.

I never used it, but it could be a good item for schools

I have encarta 2008 it’s very nice i prepare most of my projects through it

But how could they do this? What will Archer and the Gorgonites do without the resources of Encarta? The Commando Elite will surely find them easier without it…

:D

It was just a matter of time… this could be the begining of the end of Microsfot Desktop Software…

Well now I feel old.

I got my first copy of Encarta before the internet was upon me, maybe 1993 or 1994. It contained video and lots of pics and I saw this as the death of encyclopedias at the time. Encarta was definitely a big deal but I have not looked at it since probably 1997.

Getting back to the ‘Great Wikipedia’ we really have to be careful with what we look at as truth. Wikipedia is barely peer reviewed and is so openly editable that you can not always trust the info in there.

I didn’t even know Encarta still existed, I thought I died a long time ago when google maps walkt into the front light..

I have encarta 2001…and it doesn’t even work anymore…

I thank Microsoft for putting it out initially. It was usefull at it’s inception, but like so many other tools it became obsolete. I don’t think it will ever regain its usefullness and It is a smart move by MS to stop supporting it

Never owned or used Encarta. Enciclopedia Treccani FTW