[washadjeffmad]

We didn't have a huge library of books, but my parents had a full set of The World Book encyclopedias, a physician's desk reference, an illustrated home repair manual, and another full series of both Time Life "A Child's First Library of Knowledge" and "Knowledge Encyclopedia" for kids. These are what I spent the most time with.

We also had an excellent electronic dictionary with a few interesting games and a thorough etymology.

Living in the country, we were often in the car for extended periods and had catalogues of books on tape, mostly of the classics. Otherwise, we lived about half a mile, walking distance, from the town library and would go up on weekends.

On the computer, after CD-ROM drives became affordable, I particularly enjoyed interactive multimedia like Microsoft's Encarta, all of Knowledge Adventure titles, Explorapedia, and DK's "The Way Things Work". After Macromedia Shockwave, tons of eclectic titles about any given subject were being published, and we had discs ranging from the Civil War to Music Americana to I Love Lucy.

Remember, libraries can be anything. Don't limit yourself!

[tsumnia]

Encarta 95 was one of the greatest pieces of software history created in my opinion. I know I would spend hours playing the adventure game in it, swapping between the map and articles to answer all the questions.

There's been some attempts at replicating it with Wikipedia, but I think why it was so popular was because most of the time you were playing it because someone was on the phone, so you weren't allowed online. It was one of the other programs you'd throw up like Space Pinball, the old school screensavers, MS Paint, or even Microsoft Bob to just 'play around' on the computer.