CD ROM encyclopedias were only really viable when dial up speeds limited the amount of multimedia content on the internet. Both Microsoft and Britannica were victims of internet encyclopedias. And now static internet based encyclopedias are themselves under threat of personalised AI content as well. The pursuit of knowledge keeps changing what knowledge itself looks like.
Ahh AoK is such an amazing game! I kind of want to download it now. I was never very good at it as a kid, spent _way_ too much time building my own campaigns with triggers (this was in the early days before I had discovered programming languages) - obviously no-one ever actually played these.
I still have my boxed copy of Encarta 2001. The interactive world atlas was the best feature! Miles ahead of everything at the time. Multiple layers of stats from population to weather to languages etc https://youtu.be/zsbShjlh6xk?si=4U47LILUmKPfXgPY&t=320
I kind of wish these fixed large encyclopedia were still going in 2019 to capture a pre AI corpus.
But I suppose that would pre-COVID too.
Still I'd quite have liked something like that.
Some have suggested a Wikipedia snapshot which can be browsed locally - not bad but not the same vibe as curated professionally written Encarta or Britannica.
This makes me raise the question whether it's possible to view wikipedia as per ...? I know i can go back per article - but can I browse wikipidea as it was in 2005?
No. This is technically insurmountable. The main obstacles involve the fact that templates and their formatting has changed drastically, and also the media that is stored on Commons has also changed commensurately.
It is not nearly enough to simply view an old revision from 21 years ago. It would be replete with broken templates, broken formatting, redlinks, and missing images, at the very least. And that applies to every single article, across the board, no matter what its content. The more comprehensive the article, the more broken it would look.
It's just a crappy render of a Windows VM's display, in all it's upscaled pixelated glory, it's not even doing anything webby like a Javascript engine that decodes whatever database Encarta used and rendered the data in crisp HTML.
If they had asked AI to do all the above, I'd be more impressed than this (I'm guessing) human-made slop...
But I suppose that would pre-COVID too.
Still I'd quite have liked something like that.
Some have suggested a Wikipedia snapshot which can be browsed locally - not bad but not the same vibe as curated professionally written Encarta or Britannica.
https://benwinding.github.io/encarta_95_web/#/article/Rock%2...
It is not nearly enough to simply view an old revision from 21 years ago. It would be replete with broken templates, broken formatting, redlinks, and missing images, at the very least. And that applies to every single article, across the board, no matter what its content. The more comprehensive the article, the more broken it would look.
The output canvas has width="1024" height="768", but the CSS:
#screen_container canvas, #screen_container > div {
}overwrites it, making everything be upscaled...
It would look fine upscaled if only no one added the CSS rule "image-rendering: pixelated"
It's just a crappy render of a Windows VM's display, in all it's upscaled pixelated glory, it's not even doing anything webby like a Javascript engine that decodes whatever database Encarta used and rendered the data in crisp HTML.
If they had asked AI to do all the above, I'd be more impressed than this (I'm guessing) human-made slop...
Actually, I didn't know that one could ship a pre-booted OS inside the emulator.
(Mouse is VERY touchy though)