I remember when our family first got Encarta, and I spent hour after hour reading and marvelling about how all this information could be so easily accessible! I think we had a 14k dial-up Internet connection at the time, and the web was barely getting started - I really had no idea how things would turn out!
Although I do remember the hard geography questions very frequently just being "What is the county seat of (insert random US county)?"
Besides Encarta, the mid 90s where also the time where I was first able to buy satellite imagery on CR-ROM for all of Germany from my collected lunch money and years before Microsoft's TerraServer changed the world, which itself was long before Google Maps took over.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8q89q4/microsofts-terrase...
Once some kid in my third grade class asked why race cars made noise they do when they passed, the teacher didn't give a satisfactory answer, and I was able to explain the Doppler effect to them based on animation I watched on Encarta.
Good stuff.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world...
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I still remember the joy I had researching the Stegosaurus and the Platypus between my local library and my copy of Encarta for a school project <3.
There was all of one or two internet providers in our county where I grew up at that time. Maybe one. We couldn’t afford it yet but my parents bought Encarta because it seemed like a wholesome tract for computer use.
I spent countless hours on there and used it for a ton of homework. IIRC my parents used it all the time as well. They likely still have the disks kicking around someplace.