I Miss Microsoft Encarta
I worked on Encarta in the mid 90s. Here are a few tidbits you may or may not find interesting.<p>* The content was based on Funk & Wagnalls. Then we had a bunch of editors and writers cleaning up the content and adding new articles.<p>* The Windows version was always done first, then we ported to the Mac using "WLM" (Windows Library for Mac?).<p>* We used fractal compression for the images. If you never heard of this, look it up—pretty interesting. This was going to be all the rage, but then it wasn't.<p>* As a consumer product, Christmas sales were everything. Therefore, unlike most software, the schedule never slipped. There was a hard date for completion. Features would be cut to make the deadline, no matter what.<p>* When the web hit, we put professionally curated links into the articles. Best of both worlds. And you could get a subscription that would update articles and links monthly.<p>* We worked with WBUR to implement a brand-new closed captioning standard for videos.<p>* The codebase was ostensibly C++ and MFC, but it..was..complicated.<p>* Articles were edited in Word, with a bunch of custom macros, and exported to RTF. There was a lot more processing that went on after that to shove all that content onto the CD, but I wasn't too familiar with that  part.<p>* Later versions occupied more than one CD. Swapping was a real pain, but if you had multiple CD-ROM drives, it would accommodate you.