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I miss Mind Maze. I actually won that game.

It's meaningless to you, but even how I reflect on these moments with the encyclopedia, with Encarta, that taught me about the world that you would only ever possibly know studying the field's texts or talking with an expert. The fundamentals of building a dam. That wasn't something you could have.

Is that really only due to tech in 2000 or is this also shortly before you went from being sheltered by your parents and society to becoming an adult who was exposed to everything going on?

I got into a conversation with someone who lived in Italy, while I was slowly downloading a song from them on Napster, or maybe Kazaa. I was brimming with optimism - everything was going to change, we could all talk to each other now and see that we were all the same. I was 14. I was wrong.

We were so goddamn naive.

I watched the postage stamp size videos of JFK’s “ask not what your country can do for you…” speech and Neil Armstrong’s “One small step…” over and over and over again.

I remember seeing wikipedia for the first time and knowing i would be forever free of encarta. Such a feeling. And I still have it, just that one bit of promise kept.

Encarta was so good.

Loved playing the trivia game

I miss Encarta

I had forgotten about Encarta. It was an encyclopedia that was somehow kind of fun to browse.

No one understands now what it was like, having to use a card catalog to find books. You had to have The Knowing Of The Catalog. Dewey Decimal. Rubber stamp chonking the due date in that little card in the back. Arms LOADED with books on the bus home. Cracking spines and turning pages. Quiet bliss.

I came here to say this the little quotes between screens ??? Even a broken clock is right twice a day The world is your oyster

I spent so much time on Encarta, the mindmaze was addictive.

:)

My parents bought an encyclopedia set on the year I was born. Colliers 1959. I used it a lot. It remained in the house we bought from them, but became water damaged over the years. There are a few volumes left, along with 9/10 Children's Classics. I need to find another Volume 10.

I would describe the internet age as an unlocking of anti-wisdom.

Encarta 95. I remember my brother using it for a report and my dad and I playing Mind Maze together. Good times. I miss that era.

Going to the library, putting the encarta cd in a caddy into the computer, and watching a time lapse of mold on bread? Magic

Tell me more?

Over the phone? I wonder if anything like that exists today.

It was a 2 book set, so abridged compared to the full on encyclopedia sets. Might have been more than 70, but that's what my memory is trying to claim.

When I was a kid, my uncle was seeing a teacher for a while. She gave our family an old set of old World Book encyclopedias that her school was getting rid of. I loved those books, and would regularly just pick one at random and start reading a random page. I have such strong memories of that.

I remember reading in our expensive encyclopaedia and being amazed I didn’t have to cycle all the way to the city library to look up information about volcanoes. Knowledge had a price and having it was a privilege.

blessed timeline

Knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System and the ability to search a card catalog.

So I was right, but that seems young to mythologize encyclopedias

We had a shared family set of encyclopedias in the den. Everyone enjoyed reading the articles. Just open at random and find something interesting Also a very thick dictionary that, believe it or not, all of us also browsed for fun

Oh, that's very cool. I have a copy of the 1911 edition (with the post Great War addendums) and occasionally leaf through it. Fascinating stuff.

The main set is packed away right now but the first edition reprint is on the mantle:

Still have it 56 years later.....

Thought I'd chime in as a fellow Gen-Xer but someone who wasn't contributing to digital info preservation/dissemination in '90s other than as a budding journalist. I got there in a non-traditional way entirely bc of the open wide Internet & doubt whether I'd be able to take that path in this era.

My first encyclopedia

Written by AI (Apols to Joni)

Contemporaneous “interactive media”

Honestly the greatest day of my life was the day my parents got a set of World Book Encyclopedias.

Ah, to get lost in an encyclopedia rabbit hole….

When I was a kid our school had an old retired set in almost every room. I would finish my work early and grab a random encyclopedia to read. The first time I got access to Wikipedia I didn't have tabbed browsing and almost crashed the computer with hyperlinks I clicked to learn more.

We had the World Book Encyclopedia. Later, we got Encyclopedia Britannica. They were immensely valuable.

One person wont save shit. Remember "ape together strong". Organize. Unionize.

You make me uncomfortably aware that I have currently 51 Wikipedia tabs open. I still plan to read them all. The amount of knowledge we have available now for free is amazing.

It was a number of years later when I happened to think about that exchange and go "wait a goddamn second...."

just saw ad for the encylopedia full set of books for $800 for 2025, and man if I had the space .....

📌

I am a little older than you, from a different country but, as I was reading this out loud to my wife my I had to stop, to keep myself from crying. More than once we've said similar things, and wondered if we were idealizing our lived experience. My heart breaks for what could have been... Thank you

I had the 1968 World Book Encyclopedia with the Childcraft extension (which included a pretty spot on prediction of the internet). I knew how lucky I was to have them, spending countless hours flipping pages, knowing one day it would be easy. It'd be a global community. And look what we made of it.