I would imagine it was harder to get information on topics as you would’ve had to buy/borrow encyclopedias to do.
Were there proprietary predecessor websites?
Tell me about the dark ages!
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Well, you see, we’d learn everything from my best friends older brother that smoked too much weed and was unemployed.
If he was wrong, then you simply didn’t know he was wrong and you’d go around spouting off nonsense, cause yeah huh I heard it from Jake’s brother
In the long-long-ago, encyclopaedias were on paper, 28 volumes, and weighed 14kg. Quite comprehensive.
Then encyclopaedias were on a CD or two, around 100g.
Before Wikipedia, everything2 was a previous example of a massively-interlinked-website. You could search and maybe turn up some details.
Or prior to google being created, you would just do a search in metacrawler.com to usually turn up some OK answers.
Metacrawler takes me back, as well as having to use paper encyclopaedias for school!
library
One word: Encarta.
This.
“Don’t just copy and paste from Encarta” was commonly recited by my teachers when I was younger
I’m a little bit younger than you, so for me, it was used Wikipedia as a starting source, but do not reference it. Find your own information. We just used Wikipedia to familiarize ourselves with a topic and the terms that we would then have to actually look up and source other sites.
Encyclopædia Britannica also used to have a version released on DVD.
I remember when this came out, blew my mind. 1 cd vs a couple hundred kg worth of huge analogue encyclopaedia books.
The introduction of CD-ROM was mind blowing for me. Encyclopedias, interactive storybooks, talking Carmen Sandiego?!
It felt so futuristic.
Remember the Mindmaze game in Encarta?
Yes! I loved the mind maze. I was never really good at it (English is not my native language), but it was always fun to play.
I would bother my parents afterwards with all the facts I had learned. They were indulging at first, but even the greatest of patience will run out eventually :)
And before that, Britannica
Three thousand this 👆
Edit: Apparently you can still order an updated print edition of the World Book Encyclopedia for the low price of $1,259.00.
Britannica was for the rich folks… I grew up on World Book!
And we cut a ton of stuff out of them. Only one book report on a given topic or you gotta buy a new set of encyclopedias.
Just picked the best picture that showed up when I looked up encyclopedia. 🤷♂️
I’m not British, or a native English speaker, so mine really looked more like this:
This, but since these were expensive, lots of people bought cheaper, off-brand ones book-by-book at grocery stores over a period of 30+ weeks. We had a set growing up that my mother would pick up at whatever store we were going to, IDK, I was little.
What was life like before encyclopedia?
I’m not that old.
Sort of this: https://youtube.com/shorts/HHpwvXNtpBo
But also it was kind of depressive, because you would think “I wonder how X works” and that was that, you never learned petty stuff because doing so was too much hassle for a simple curiosity.
Before wiki you could still find answers on Google or Yahoo, but there was no source of truth and you could find any answer you wanted if you looked for it, so it was taken with a grain of salt. Before that, yes, encyclopedias or asking someone who knew about it, but then you could get wrong answers and not know about it.
Back then we used to think that people seemed stupid because they didn’t have access to information, so if they had learned something wrong there was no way of convincing them otherwise.
This refers to Google instead of Wikipedia, but I think this cartoon still applies. 🤣
This sums it up. That cool song you would like to know the name or artist? Bad luck if it wasn’t popular. Where does x idiom come from? Wait until you’re at home/the library.
You would have many of these unresolved questions for years, until some solved itself fortuitously.
That cool song you would like to know the name or artist?
You’d ask the guys at the record store, ofc.
I had a particular set of notes stuck in my head for decades. Then one day about 10 years ago I finally managed to remember one of the words of the song, and with that actually managed to google the song. I thought it was something I would never hear again. That song is My Love is Alive by Gary Wright. I remembered the 6 notes in the bass line and that had been driving me nuts for decades.
I’ll be honest man: it sucked.
Imagine a time where you had a question, and you just… didn’t get to know the answer. Like, literally every time you just had to hope someone in your general area had some level of confidence in their answer to satisfy your curiosity until you could confirm it later. Or you’d just go around repeating it to people with out confirming. Whatever.
If something was important enough, you’d go track down an answer. Remember to look it up when you got home using your parent’s encyclopedias. Or make a trip to the library.
In a way, we kind of lost something: conversation and discussion. Before I feel like people really picked apart an issue where you’d all come up with a consensus over a few hours of discussion about a topic at a party or something. Then someone would come back with the answer another day, and bring in some more stuff they learned while looking it up, and it would start a whole new conversation.
Before that, you had to get your Encyclopedia on a CD. Encarta '98 was the shit. Some of the articles had pictures and even video clips! At 320x240 resolution and 15 FPS, but my laptop was playing real video, like a TV! It was mind-blowing shit. I watched the video clip of a earthquake in Kobe, Japan over and over again. If I remember correctly, there was actually a second video of people white-water rafting. Two whole videos, that I could play on my computer. Those were the days…
I also learned a ton about different instruments by playing that interactive game where you match them to their countries. Thanks to Encarta I was probably in the privileged minority of American 8 year olds that knew what the heck a digerido, pan flute, or sitar was! :D
AHH Encarta and the mind maze
IIRC it also had a clip of the Apollo 11 launch and moon landing. Amazing stuff.
So you wanna play some basketball?
My school in the 90s had to ban watching the Encarta Basketball video. We’re in the UK and don’t really have much of a basketball culture but students flocked to the computer room every day to watch it because of the novelty of seeing a video play on a computer monitor.
I also think I remember the earthquake video, I think Encarta 95 had about 6 videos…
We had this thing called a library. With books.
There was Encarta.
Arguments at the dinner table were solved by an exasperated FINE, I’ll get up and get the encyclopedia just to prove you wrong
Also, we had Encarta. It wasn’t online, but on a CD-ROM so you could view it digitally compared to the dozens of hefty books
We didn’t have that so the old copy of Websters dictionary was hauled out.
We didn’t have encarta either. We would break out the encyclopedia
And any school project started with the encyclopedia and then a trip to the library for further research.
When I learned about Wikipedia it was awesome.
I remember a time when people got into arguments over who played a roll in a movie. one time we drove to a video rental store to settle it.
