Microsoft Encarta

Microsoft Encarta: Digital Multimedia Encyclopedia

Digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009, providing informative articles, images, video, and sounds on various topics.

What is Microsoft Encarta?

Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. It was initially released in 1993 on CD-ROM for Windows and Macintosh computers. Subsequent versions were later released on DVD as well as an online subscription version.

Encarta provided informative articles, images, videos, sounds/audio, and maps spanning a wide range of topics in various fields of knowledge like science, technology, humanities, and more. It was designed to be an engaging interactive resource for knowledge discovery especially for students and home users before the advent of Wikipedia and widespread internet access.

Some key features of Encarta included an interactive atlas, library of videos and animations, dictionary, thesaurus, student-friendly research tools, editing tools like highlighting and note taking capabilities. It even had trivia games to engage users.

However, by the late 2000s, Encarta's CD/DVD business model declined in popularity with the growth of free online encyclopedias like Wikipedia. The last version of Encarta was available online for a subscription fee until 2009 when Microsoft announced its discontinuation citing Wikipedia's dominance and the evolution of internet access rendering old-style encyclopedias obsolete.

Microsoft Encarta Features

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