torrent grandmaster flash and the furious five wikipedia

I wrote about this topic a few years ago ( ), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to speak up (I added some of his comments to the piece).

Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity elements of Encarta make it something that you kind of wish had a more direct role in the modern day. In any case, there were no tools or browsers at all, so we had to build everything - including our own search engine for the CD-ROM.Įncarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. The compilation was very slow and required huge amounts of RAM.Īround this time, the team had some awareness of HTML as one of many emerging hypertext markup languages, but the internet was still a few years away and no one knew what format would 'win' for hypertext. The whole thing got exported as RTF and fed to a compiler, which created the runtime data structures optimized for CD-ROM access and that also built a full-text search index.

Hyperlinks were defined using footnotes, and animation and audio placeholders were defined with custom OLE objects. It was a lot of effort to find a combination of hardware and drivers that would work reliably together.Įncarta itself (at least at that time) was written as a Word document. In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC with an early CD-ROM drive to demo an early build of Encarta at a trade show.

IIRC the BMP, WAV, and AVI file formats all came from this team at about this time. I worked in Microsoft's Multimedia Division, tasked with creating the first video and audio drivers for Windows. Encarta was part of my first job out of university.

Torrent grandmaster flash and the furious five wikipedia