Before the internet or Wikipedia existed, the only way to obtain information about a character or historical event was through books or physical encyclopedias. However, that changed in 1993, when Microsoft released the first version of Encarta, a virtual encyclopedia that was very popular at the time. What happened to this software?
If you ever used any of the versions of Encarta for your school work, you will surely remember that this program provided reliable information on history, economics, religion, among other topics. In addition to the texts that were offered, users also had access to images, illustrations, and even videos.
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What was the origin of Encarta?
In the 1980s, Bill Gates was in talks with the Encyclopedia Britannica to work together on this project; however, they did not accept, since they thought it would decrease their sales. For this reason, the founder of Microsoft allied himself with the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia and they released the first version of Encarta in 1993.
Because it was priced too high ($400) and there were so few people with a home computer, it didn’t have as many sales. Microsoft realized its mistake and started lowering the prices considerably (US$99), which allowed more users to have access to this valuable program.
For many years, Encarta was the software of choice for students, not only in the United States, but in other countries around the world, as later versions were available in multiple languages. Special versions focused on children or on the teaching of mathematics were even released.
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Everything has its end
The nineties was the golden age of Encarta; however, with the massification of the internet, it began to lose popularity. The final blow was provided by Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia that was born in 2001 and was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. This page quickly gained millions of users, who could edit the articles.
Microsoft wanted to compete with Wikipedia so they also released a free version of Encarta, the problem is that it had very few articles. Years passed and Bill Gates’ company accepted that it had lost the battle, so in 2009 it announced that it would stop developing and supporting this software.