Show HN: Encarta 95 Web
benwinding.github.ioEncarta is super nostalgic, and I was surprised it wasn't available to use online. So I embarked on the difficult task of making it so.
The way this works is the most convoluted, nonsense and brittle system ever... but it works as a statically hosted gh-pages site!
Please note: All the material on this site is freely available through the internet archive (see github readme)
Github repo -> https://github.com/benwinding/encarta_95_web
Yes! The interactive demo of simple orbital mechanics is there and works, just like I remember it. The last time I saw this... was actually 1995.
You goto the article for "Orbit" and under "Laws of Motion", click "Orbit Interactivity" and then click the large graphic that appears to launch the interactive applet.
As a young person I sat and went through every article looking for these little interactive applets. This was my favorite for some reason.
Another fun tidbit is, in the '95 version, if you send the moon into the Earth, it just bounces off. In, I believe, the 1996 version, they updated it- to I think a generic red colored planet and gray moon (if my memory after 30 years is correct) and if you send the moon into the planet, it would explode!
Yeah. I spent a lot of time with these CD-rom's.
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.
Britannica actually had a great website during the dot com era - hyperlinked, very browsable, and definitely had that semi-addictive "rabbithole" quality.
The hurt themselves badly by imposing a really annoying paywall just as Wikipedia was beginning to take off. A hybrid model with tiered access (maybe even a limited ad-supported free tier) might well have kept them on top - instead, they offered only a single expensive annual plan priced to compete with the paper or CD editions.
Tangentially, my hot take is that the rise of paywalls on news sites in the mid-2010s led to the growth of misinformation.
I got carried away and started playing the Age of Empires Demo from the desktop after I exited Encarta
Glad to see I'm not the only one who immediately ditched an opportunity to learn for AoE. It lures like a siren's song.
it is amazing that you can emulate win 95 on a browser tab and play win 95 video games like it's 1998.
It goes to show how actually powerful modern hardware is, and how much of it is squandered by modern software.
Back to prompting now.
Me too
I don't know what it is that creates this feeling, but I am so drawn to read the text when I click into the site. Much more so than on Wikipedia or other online sources. Is it just nostalgia? I don't have any concrete memories of Encarta, other than a general awareness. Is it written better? Maybe slightly, if at all - I wouldn't say that Wikipedia content is not written well, on average.
So what is it? I genuinely wonder. Maybe just the style of the visuals, a throwback to when a written piece of content online "mattered" more, as it represented something more, too.
It may not matter, but distinguishing what captivates and what naturally glosses seems like it may matter greatly in a space suffused by content.
The cursor on mobile is unreliable. It tries to act like a touchpad on a touch screen but then reverts to a direct “point” when you try to click your virtual touchpad.
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.
What a throwback. Right back to writing "book reports" in middle school.
The text looks very weird on my PC, see: https://imgur.com/a/vAMVHc7
isn't that how it looked at the time?
Yes and no. It was pixelated, not irregular and ugly. Here is bad quality rescaling at work.
No, of course not.
Immediately jumped straight to MindMaze.
The first thing I looked for as well. The nostalgia.
Just checked, the Soundgarden clip is in its proper place on the Rock Music article. Fantastic work.
Nice! Here’s the permalink for “Rock Music” (it’s funny how this is implemented)
https://benwinding.github.io/encarta_95_web/#/article/Rock%2...
The mouse hijack feels really weird
It's because it's basically a fully emulated PC running Windows 95. It's not a recreation of Encarta for the web, which would me much nicer IMHO.
Encarta 99 was awesome back in the day. Groliers. World Book. Britannica. They were amazing.
All that rich interactive reference material at your fingertips, offline, was an absolute joy.
Wait, it even features a windows 95? nice easter egg
It is loading a Windows 95 VM (using https://copy.sh/v86/) and runs an actual copy of Encarta 95 there, yeah.
OP wrote: "difficult task"...
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...
I guess? I agree that parsing out the articles and rendering them in the HTML would make it more readable. But the author didn’t just throw together Win95 and Encarta in a VM and call it a day, there are subtle tweaks here so I think calling it “human slop” is incorrect.
(For example, there’s some URL magic going on -- articles you open show up in the fragment portion, e.g. #/article/Art -- which is non-trivial considering you have to pass that information into the VM and back.)
You talk so much about slop examples, can you provide a non-slop example to show you know the difference?
I can, but in this instance I don't care to fulfill your wishes. If you can't figure out the difference, you're on your own.
and includes AoE 2 :D
And PovRay, Super Pi and some other stuff...
Actually, I didn't know that one could ship a pre-booted OS inside the emulator.
Oh God I remember running this on my dad's computer which had the first CD-ROM drive I had seen. I felt like I was in a spaceship
I remember the CD drive on the school computer took CDs in a big case with a floppy like opening.
The very first program I ever used on my father's PC, and would constantly get stuck playing Mind Maze for hours.
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.
For real! What a cool little easter egg in this already super-cool web app
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.
Was actually thinking about rebuilding this but good job. The cursor is acting weird though
the problem i have is the mouse control is weird.
It does not work at all for me (touchpad/Firefox/Linux).
wow blast from the past. I do beleive this exact version prob in exactly 95 was the first CD I ever inserted into a CD rom. lots of fun!
Does anyone else remember the encarta CDs that came with boxed Kellogg's cereals?
I wish there were an option to keep the native cursor, the captured cursor doesn't work with my browser.
I love how old school it looks, even the old Windows desktop!
did civilisation peak with encarta
Oh, that's very nostalgic, even though I only got acquainted with Encarta in the 2000s
this makes me long for the past. why does this feel so safe and cozy? gents?
Complete with MIND MAZE!
Start menu > Run > sol.exe for solitaire :)
Mind Maze yesssssssssssss
Holy memories of the family computer in the living room batman!
Straight to Mind Maze for me!
(Mouse is VERY touchy though)
Didn’t this have a splash screen with a load of sound clips playing? (“I have a dream…”) - was disappointed that didn’t happen! (Or was that ‘98?)
NICE - thank u