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!
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!
In retrospect, that Encarta had its moment and MS didn’t realize that they could have just turned it into a website before Wikipedia made it entirely redundant is a major loss. It could have been a for-profit staple like Facebook, but nope.
FWIW, I am looking at the encyclopaedia my family owned before the Internet. It’s still here on my shelves, along with other collections of books in bulk. People would show up to your door and sell you these sometimes, and it wasn’t always a scam. It served us well.
There was a trivia game show over here when I was a kid where the final round included a very obscure question (think “what was the name of the cousin of Stalin that was a film director in the 80s” or whatever) and were given ten minutes and an encyclopaedia to look it up. It was considered very hard and most episodes it resulted in failure.
You could ABSOLUTELY resurrect that format by cutting the time significantly and giving people access to Wikipedia. That’s easy money right there.