[joblessjunkie]

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

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. It was a lot of effort to find a combination of hardware and drivers that would work reliably together.

Encarta itself (at least at that time) was written as a Word document. Hyperlinks were defined using footnotes, and animation and audio placeholders were defined with custom OLE objects. 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. The compilation was very slow and required huge amounts of RAM.

Around 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. 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.

[elboru]

This kind of comment is the exact reason why I keep coming back to HN. It's great to read stories of real people who have worked in all kinds of amazing and inspiring projects, thanks for sharing your experience with us, it's always nice to read about technical details of legendary software.

[cvhashim]

Right. I used to spend hours on encarta as a kid :)

[hoyd]

Totally agree

[akgoel]

This basically sounds like WinHelp, which was a compiled format of RTF, prior to the availability of HTML.

[joblessjunkie]

It was in fact exactly that. The WinHelp team got folded into our group, and then WinHelp became something of an orphaned project for a while (or maybe forever?).

[doomjunky]

Off topic: Thank you for getting me to research the history of the hyperlink [1].

- 1945 linked microfilm pages in the essay "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush [2]

- 1964 the term "hyperlink" in Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson

- 1983 the "highlighted link" in HyperTIES system by Dan Ostroffin [3]

- 1989 manifesto for the Web by Tim Berners-Lee

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#History

[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

[3]: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/

[tudorw]

If you like that you might love this trip back in time from the one and only Douglas Adams;

"Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest."

https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdams-Hyperland

[snoshy]

Not to stray too far from the subject, and you clearly have some valuable ability to improvise in tough engineering requirements. Where did you end up?

[wingerlang]

Hopefully his username is not an indication.

[vonseel]

Haha, I was thinking the same thing, but hopefully he is retired after 30 years in tech (with a nice retirement portfolio assuming he worked at MSFT in the early 90s).

[ozzmotik]

i certainly found myself thinking a similar thought, if only because said username seems highly applicable to my own life. mostly the jobless part as i have done a lot of work to leave the junkie aspect behind but i would be lying if I said vestiges of it don't still remain

[jamiethompson]

I can remember teaching myself HTML using a WinHelp file I found on a magazine coverdisk.

[jenscow]

Exactly what I was thinking.

That was a pain - I think I ended up writing RTF by hand.

[badsectoracula]

Authoring WinHelp files is a pain (and indeed better done by hand or via a convertor from a saner format), but from a user perspective WinHelp is IMO the best format - the only thing i'd like (assuming WinHelp was still distributed with Windows 10 - though you can copy it from a machine that has it and it'll work) is the contents sidebar from HTMLHelp (which is also nice, but a full blown browser engine is IMO overkill and it gets often abused with fancy CSS and javascript effects in some CHM files - WinHelp is too limited for that, though some programs did try to push things further than should be pushed).

[CaptainZapp]

Call me a very ancient oldie, but the - in my opinion - best help system ever was the one from VAX/VMS.

It was rather simple, but thanks to its hyrarchical structure extremely accessible, even when you just started using the operating system.

DEC's extraordinarilly well structured documentation added to the whole experience.

Compared to that most technical documentation today is outright atrocious.

[simonh]

I was on a mailing list for a 'fanzine' in the 90's that was actually mailed around as a WinHelp file. It was actually really nice.

[SuoDuanDao]

Hey, thanks for your work! I got a CD-ROM holding Encarta '95 for Christmas when I was in grade school and I loved it - spent a lot of time on that program over the years, and it really helped develop my love of learning.

[mixmastamyk]

> In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC

Interesting, as the 486 came out in late '89. Seems you'd like a little more oomph, but perhaps they were too expensive at the time.

[joblessjunkie]

One product design goal was to run on the mass market 386 PCs of the time.

It wasn't so much about oomph as it was about buggy device drivers that would inevitably blue screen at some point, or flaky CD-ROM drives that just never seemed to read the same data twice the same way.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Seems you'd like a little more oomph

Seems like a case of "high-spec dev machine" vs "example target device".

[1stcity3rdcoast]

A good point, so I just looked it up. This April 1991 ad [0] shows 386 desktops with a hard drive at around $2000 in 1991 prices, and the comparable 486 models with a hard drive start at $7300.

To put that in perspective, $2000 in 1991 is $3700 in today’s dollars, and the 486 would be a staggering $13,500 today.

[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/InfoWorld.html?id=0FAEA...

[mixmastamyk]

Interesting, I do remember 2000+ dollar computers in that time period, but $3700!?

Although '91 is earlier than I got back into PCs, strongest memories are probably more around '93, '94. The 486SX might have been the ~$2000 computer at that time. I remember later having the AMD 386/40 and 486/100 made better performance affordable.

[ew6082]

At that time you could get a moderate 386 system at Walmart or Radio Shack for around $800. These were pretty common consumer systems for kids just on their way to college.

[hollerith]

>the internet was still a few years away

Internet history fairy here to make sure people know that the internet has been in continuous operation since 1969 [1]. (And DARPA started funding research for the express purpose of creating a global computer network in 1960.)

What was still a few years away in '91 is awareness or interest in the internet by a significant fraction of consumers (or by Bill Gates for that matter).

[1]: Some people would deny the name "internet" to any network prior to the introduction of the internet protocol suite in 1982, but it was the same user-visible services (email, ftp, telnet, netnews, etc) running on both the earlier network that began operation in 1969 and the later network that some want to reserve the name "internet" for. In other words, the switch in 1983 from NCP to TCP/IP was mostly transparent to users.

[joblessjunkie]

You are of course correct; mea culpa.

We had internet; what we didn't yet have was HTTP.

[hollerith]

No, we had HTTP in '91, but the web was small and consisted almost entirely of information about physics and computing.

And we didn't yet have a graphical web browser that ran on Windows or Mac. And MSDOS was AFAIK never adapted to allow the computer to interact with the user while something was downloading or uploading. (I.e., it lacked the necessary kind of multitasking.)

[fallensatan]

I just want to thank you for your work on Encarta. It was the first _real software_ I interacted with in my teen years; it fascinated me a lot back then and I believe it’s part of the reason I’m in software industry. Thank you.

[cptaj]

I definitely poured hours into Encarta as well. I was already a big fan of computers but I do wonder how much of an impact Encarta had on me. It definitely built up that early browsing habit that translated so seamlessly into the web.