Farewell, Microsoft Encarta

Microsoft announced today that it’s going to shut­ter its Encarta ency­clo­pe­dia because “peo­ple today seek and con­sume infor­ma­tion in con­sid­er­ably dif­fer­ent ways than in years past.”

In other words, peo­ple want their ency­clo­pe­dias to be like the Wikipedia, liv­ing and con­stantly evolv­ing things — not a DVD-ROM.

Still, it’s a sad day for me. When I got my first Windows com­puter back in 1995, it came with Encarta, and though I never used it for its intended pur­pose, it was still neat to have a whole ency­clo­pe­dia on a CD-ROM (or was it on two of them?).

Of course, I haven’t used any ency­clo­pe­dia that doesn’t have the words “Wiki” or “Britannica” in its title for years now, but that doesn’t mean I don’t retain fond feel­ings for my old Encarta ’95 discs.

I also miss the fact that my old Packard Bell PC came with a copy of the Weezer “Buddy Holly” video on a CD, to demon­strate my pow­er­house PC’s color video capabilities.

Ah, com­put­ers of the 1990s, I miss you.

Related posts:

1. Encyclopedic Knowledge, Then vs. Now
2. WikiCourt
3. A List Apart
4. Trolling Knol
5. Microsoft and Yahoo may yet do business