Though Encarta is no longer available, its legacy will live on with Wikipedia and the online versions of popular encyclopedias that were forced to improve their products to compete with it. Encyclopedia Britannica online and offer web versions of their respected encyclopedias that feature more multimedia enhancements than Wikipedia, but none really approach the pioneering capabilities of Encarta. On the other hand, for users wishing to emulate Encarta's immersive multimedia experience, there are few good options. With its aforementioned number of articles and human editing process, Wikipedia has become the standard place to search for encyclopedic information on the Internet, despite a penchant for inaccuracies. In addition to a standard version of 12 CD-ROM disks that would need to be annoyingly swapped out as readers browsed content, Encarta 99 also came in a 3 disc DVD-ROM edition that involved much less disc swapping.įor users looking for text content, raw data and vital facts, there is only one answer to the question of where to turn - Wikipedia. Encarta 99 was one of the first computer software titles and the very first encyclopedia to be released on DVD-ROM. In 1998, Encarta was at the forefront of another technology revolution - the DVD. When viewed within an article, these maps could be overlaid with various data points. Microsoft MapPoint was embedded within Encarta, and allowed users to interact with a virtual globe that could be zoomed and rotated freely to zoom in to street level in metropolitan cities. Related ArticlesĮncarta also pioneered dynamic mapping functions that are considered standard today with services such as Google Maps and MapQuest.
When Encarta made the move to the web in the late 1990s, users were already familiar with how Encarta functioned. Encarta users could browse the encyclopedia and jump from one article to another using hyperlinks. It was very similar to the World Wide Web, in that hypertext could be displayed, linked and searched. Chief among these was Encarta's markup language.
From the beginning, Microsoft bestowed Encarta with a number of features that would become hallmarks for multimedia encyclopedias.
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