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Comment by oriesdan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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