Comment by kar1181 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kar1181 | Hacker News Reader

That whole period of the PC industry where 'multimedia' became mainstream was pretty magical. I know the Amiga was well ahead of the PC ecosystem for a long time in capability but it never hit schools (at least where I grew up in South Australia) like PCs did. So with the emergence of VGA and Super VGA, widespread availability (and relative affordability) of 486 DX class PCs, Soundblasters and Optical Drives, the PC overran the other home computers.

Games and applications were evolving at break-neck speed and the pace of change really made you feel anything was possible. Encarta was really a product of that time.

If you were doing primary / secondary school during the 90s, you'd have had to do projects where paper encyclopaedias were your primary resource. For me in a rural school it wasn't until the mid 90s we had 486PCs with CDROM drives and going from Britannica to the searchable rich media database that was Encarta was a massive force multiplier. It was a remarkable demonstration of how positive an effect technology could have on the learning experience.

One thing I remember from those times : even knowing there was an encyclopedia on the school library computer, I would not use it, because it just sounded impractical. I would need to ask for permission to use the computer, then wait for it to start, then figure how to do a search, while the competitive proposition was just picking the encyclopedia volume for the correct letter and finding my page!

How much a few decades can change… I would call painful the idea of manually looking for a page in a book rather than doing a computer search, nowadays.

We had a very permissive culture around the PC equipment, pretty much if a computer was free you could use it. There was no authentication or use policies. That did change towards the end of my schooling when networking and internet access was finally rolled out. Novell Netware ruined everything!

I remember in second and third grade we had the same thing, except, we were running pentium 2 and 3 machines around 1998. Our school lab had about 20-25 pc's, and all of them ran windows xp.

We filled every conceivable space on those machines with pirated copies of gameboy emulators and various pokemon roms. It became a game of, will the computer admins ever realise, and if they do, will they do anything about it.

Long story short, they gave up trying to police it after about a year, when no matter what they tried, we always found another way to get the games back, in the process of course we learned quite a bit about computing (happy accident? Who cares, my love of computers started in that stupid class)

I think your memories may be merging over time. Win XP didn't come out till 2001, so it was probably win 98/98 SE running in your classroom.

One of the things I remember about school computing in the 90s was how varied the equipment could be. My school had 2-3 computers per classroom, but 2nd grade had Apple IIs, 3rd grade had... possibly an Amiga?, and 4,5,6 grade had a mix of IBM PCs and one Mac, but with what ever OS originally shipped on them, ranging from straight DOS + Windows <3, win 3.1, and Win 95. It was wacky.

It's odd, I'd rather go to a library and read a book than dig on the web now.

to be honest: I like the web for shallow access, but when I need focus and depth, a library and a book is way more fit for my brain.

Me too - since the rise of ad-funded SEO 'content farms', it's become damn hard to find information written by someone who has even a passing familiarity with the topic.

This is largely my attitude right now. I may have also described the current internet as "giant steaming shithole" a time or two because it's so polluted with dubious information and algorithmically generated content.

At the same time I've been going through some old books (mid-19th century) that were in my grandfather's house. There are some that cover extremely specific subject matters. They are well indexed, so that finding good information might indeed be easier than googling for it. I'm not saying that it's superior to internet search, but sometimes we forget that there is actually information that has never been digitized.

The internet is actually good for 19th century books. It's very rare that I can't find what I want on books.google.com. It's the early 20th century where the problems start.

Although if you are after focus and depth, arguably you would be reading some sort of primary source rather than an encyclopedia. I've definitely been at a library, had a quick question on something tangentially related to what I'm reading, and pulled up Wikipedia on my phone to quickly look something up. I wouldn't want to read a whole book on a phone, since I agree with you that I can more easily absorb information from an actual book. That being said, looking up something on my phone is far less distracting than having to get up, put the book down, and go over to look something up in an encyclopedia or dictionary.

In our country there are no public libraries, you only get access to a library during high school and university studies. When Microsoft Encarta arrived it was amazing because of the animations and color images but content is shorter compared to the ones on the libraries. Internet changed everything on information availability.

There's still one thing that I absolutely prefer looking for a page in a book rather than searching online, and that's recipes for cooking. I can't stand scrolling through pages of people telling me about the history of this thing they cooked while ads are popping up to get to the actual recipe.

And if anyone has any suggestions for better places online to look for recipes, I'd be happy to have them! I like Cooking for Engineers [0] but still usually use a book.

[0] http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

I don't mind the useless life story that accompanies every recipe these days. It's easy enough to scroll to the bottom of the page. I virtually never make any given recipe as-is anyway, and if it's something I'm going to make repeatedly I have my own document template that I use to write up the recipe and save it locally.

I can't remember the last time I used a paper recipe, and I find it strange to attribute a preference to paper to an easily avoidable side-effect of internet recipe blogging.

Check out eatyourbooks.com. It's a digital, searchable index of your paper books so you can look for recipes featuring "ras al hanout", for example, and it will tell you which books you own have recipes with that ingredient.

It's interesting, I split my childhood between Hungary and South Africa, and pretty much along the timeline of the 486. During the late 80s in Hungary, the Amiga certainly was a big thing, even in schools. I suspect it was due to the price; even an Amiga was considered super expensive, and if you ran into a PC it was either at your parents' work or similar, and it would have been a 286 or worse.

Although I suppose the 486 came out in '89, it was rare to see it in the schools that I went to, or in my friends' homes. Similarly with VGA and SVGA (and decent sound cards!), it took several years to become affordable and mainstream. But when they did, and when Pentiums started coming out, it was pretty much the death knell for the Amiga. I recall somberly looking at benchmarks of 486s, and comparing it to our pride and joy, a 68030-upgraded A1200, and realising that it was a losing game.

So you are absolutely right, though I think the timeline is probably a bit shifted depending on the country / economic conditions.

Even 386 was absolutely crushing A1200 in some respects. In Amigas, you had to set every bit of a pixel separately, which didn't hurt for 2D games with static art assets (which you just copied from memory onto the screen), but it was a killer for anything 3D based. In result, you could have a 386 run Doom IIRC, whereas 3d shooters on Amiga 1200 were much worse than even Wolfenstein 3D.

Oh yes, and Wolfenstein actually ran quite well even on a 286. Higher res and framerate than same time period Amiga titles. Aside from the additional inefficiency you mentioned, I think 3D is an area where none of the Amiga's specialised hardware chipsets helped (or at least, nowhere near enough / as much as they did with 2D), and the CPU performance disparity started to really show.

Amiga stopped investing/improving their unique hardware chipset and PC's simply overcame that deficiency by sheer CPU power and improved graphics output standards (EGA->VGA).

Hmm, to me the term "multimedia PC" already sounded outdated from the start, similar to the "a CD ROM can contain a whole library shelf worth of data" hype.

I just thought like, this 386 PC could make sound and graphics and games. This Pentium can do it too, granted with more colors and a CD ROM drive and a fancy "where do you want to go today" movie, but does that warrant all this hype of being called "multimedia"?

Oh well, that was the 90s, things moved so fast then so of course things would sound outdated and cheesy very fast.

Exactly. Back then it seemed like a word that people not much into the computer scene or non-specialist magazines would use, while to geeks the word was a joke.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC

There was an actual group with recommended ‘standards’.

I see your multimedia PC, and raise you an "information superhighway". That sounded cringey from the start.

Not as cringeworthy as Bill Gates' book in the 90s opting to entirely use that term, abbreviating it to "the Highway," and outright refusing to say "Internet."

Don’t forget Microsoft.Net

I agree. Even today I would be very reluctant to use the term "multimedia" because it sounds very dusty and boring to me. I would use "audiovisual" or something else in its place.

Though it's not really necessary to call this out anymore, seeing as virtually every corner of computing is capable of a whizz-bang multimedia experience and has been for a long time.

Even today I would be very reluctant to use the term "multimedia" because it sounds very dusty and boring to me. I would use "audiovisual" or something else in its place.

A term from the 1990's sounds dusty compared to one from the 1950's? Interesting.

> "a CD ROM can contain a whole library shelf worth of data" hype

CD-ROMs were pretty incredible for their time. Remember that when they became mainstream around 1994, hard drives were only 200 MB and floppies were 1.44 MB, so they really were game changing.

I remember when my dad bought us a copy of Encarta, I think around 2001. It had a click-and-drag Streetview style walkthrough of historical sites, including, iirc, the Great Pyramids.

I thought that was the most incredible thing ever. I remember getting my friends over after school and absolutely blowing their minds.

Yes. Also, the Encarta world map on CD I had was desirable enough to swap for a Pentium (120 or 133 MHz I believe) and some rare original IBM PC-AT chassis parts (; Encarta was an early pre-Web hypertext system from the 1992/3 multimedia/HyTime-esque era that wouldn't look bad even today. Some insiders here to share some tech internals?

I loved buying the ultra cheap CDs of random sounds, videos, and etc back in the day.

It was like magic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com