Serendipity35

Microsoft's multimedia CD-based encyclopedia product, Encarta, will be no more.

Microsoft announced the discontinuation of Encarta will be at the end of October 2009. There was not much fanfare or explanation, but I was actually more surprised that the product still was being made.

It was introduced in 1993 before the Net was available to all of us, and long before Wikipedia. It may have been the first multimedia CD I owned.

There was another multimedia encyclopedia that came first - the Academic American Encyclopedia. Microsoft got into the business by purchasing non-exclusive rights to the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia which it used in its first CD edition. Funk & Wagnalls you may remember as the encyclopedia that was sold in grocery stores. Microsoft had originally wanted to use Encyclopædia Britannica which was generally considered the best encyclopedia. Brittanica passed on the offer, not wanting to kill its print sales. Too bad for them - they were sold at a loss in 1996 when their print sales could no longer compete with Encarta. By that point, Encarta came free with many computer systems.


Microsoft later bought Collier's Encyclopedia and the New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia and incorporated them into their CD encyclopedia. All of those encyclopedias are long gone.

The 2008 Encarta Premium consists of more than 62,000 articles, photos, illustrations, music clips, videos, timelines, maps and homework tools. You can purchase an online subscription or the DVD-ROM or multiple CD-ROMs. Microsoft also publishes similar encyclopedias in German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese.

When I first saw Encarta in the mid-1990s, it was in my middle school classroom. Students thought it was great and loved to just browse the articles, photographs, the short  videos, and sound files.

I am amazed when I think back to my earlier classroom Apple IIe computers (1984) running AppleWorks word processing, spreadsheet and database off 5.25 floppy disks on a computer with 128K of memory and no hard drive at all. Running Encarta on on my Windows 3.1 PC was clunky but amazing.


I didn't save my original CD or packaging. I could archive them with Microsoft Cinemania (which looks quaint compared to something like the Internet Movie Database) and BOB (which still looks like a failure). So, rest in peace, Encarta. Do I need yet another reason for me to feel technologically old? Don't get me started talking about the classroom "lab" we had of Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 1 computers in 1980 where we taught BASIC or I just might tear up...