When I was a kid, my grandmother brought home a cardboard box with a 4-5 mis-matched volumes of encyclopedias in it. Always a bookworm, I could read an article about any subject in them and be content for hours.

You can imagine my joy when, omewhere around 1991 or 1992, we got a new computer in the library at school. It was a dedicated station for the encyclopedia, and it was even set up in the same location as the printed ones were.

My faded memory recalls it being Compton's Encyclopedia. It ran on an 286 IBM PS/2 (the all-in-one unit), and it had a mouse, external CD-ROM, and a laser printer. The rumor was that it cost $10,000. It wasn't fast, it probably took closed to a minute to search for, and then retrieve an article.