#Microsoft encarta game software
Gone now are the default looking grey buttons found in Windows related products, giving the software a more professional look. The first major facelift for Encarta happened a year earlier with Encarta '95 when most of the buttons now have their own unique look, to where everything now fits the theme of an executive looking application which comprises of a creamy, tannish colored background for the content which sits on top of a black backdrop. Why this specific one, you ask? It's the one I used back in the day. Progress kept building for a few years until we had Microsoft Encarta '96, which is what we'll be looking at today. And encapsulating it all was an interface that mimicked how navigating worked to the World Wide Web with concepts like pages and hyperlinks. Other parts include the ability to click objects to start, stop, or loop and animated image, something along the lines of an interactive flash app. With it, you have the ability to include not only text and images, but sound and video clips, too. Sure, size was a positive as everything fit on to one disc, but the second advantage was having the materials come to life by means of interactive entertainment, thanks in part to the new media type: the CD-ROM. The first version was released in 1993, with annual updates for the product soon to follow. So with this enters Microsoft Encarta, the digital answer to home reference materials. For small homes or apartments, this would be a huge selling point. Microsoft, seeing an opportunity to add educational material to their library of software to be used on their operating system, decided to create a digital version of an encyclopedia collection, removing the need to have a large part of your real estate reserved for bookshelves. With it we got the primary set, the "junior" set, the desk reference set (which was comprised of a dictionary, thesaurus, and book of quotes), and the yearbooks where the previous year was summarized into its own encyclopedia book. My parents bought the whole set, and dedicated a huge chunk of the living room for the bookcase that would hold all of the books. In the 90s, the biggest name in home reference materials was Encyclopaedia Britannica, who had commercials running on mostly every children's television network or programming block, convincing parents that buying their set is the most important things to a child's education. If you were really lucky (like me) you had an encyclopedia collection at home. Once you've selected a planet, you can then go to the library and checkout books related to the planet. First you would reference an encyclopedia to learn basic information about the solar system to find out what planets are in it with a summary of each one. As an example, imagine you are in elementary school and you need to do a report on one of the planets in the solar system. If needed, you can use an encyclopedia as a jumping off point to gather basic information on the subject and then using that intelligence gathering as a reference for the library to then select which books you need to check out. Back in the day this mainly involved going to either the school or city library (or both) and then checking out books related to the subject. We've all needed to do research for school related projects and it required us going out and getting as much information on the subject as possible to then write a report for. MS Home - Microsoft Encarta 96Octo| 20:24 | Written by: snake911