> how old are you?

[ingonymous@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft
That's why I always thought that Wikipedia was one of the biggest achievements of the internet.
Free knowledge to everyone.

[havehope@mastodon.social]

@fsniper @nixCraft Oh yeah, I remember getting a few classical books as well from those. I had so many books that I had to donate them to schools and libraries haha

[meuon@fosstodon.org]

@nixCraft Had old encyclopedia sets that circled the neighborhood, books handed off from family to family a few at a time. I'd skim and read until I fell asleep.

[coleenwalter@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft I’m old enough to remember them in my school’s library and had to use them to research and write book reports.

[javerous@social.sourcemac.com]

@nixCraft Ah yes, and the index was so big it was itself spread in multiple books

[fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net]

@nixCraft I have a full set of the French language Encyclopedia Universalis in my parents’ basement, with its distinctive white binding and extra long articles. I remember when Bill Gates helped Grolier launch the first CD-ROM encyclopedia and it was on display at Paris’ Pompidou Center. I had Britannia on CD-ROM (or was it DVD?). And I keep the 100GB ZIM offline dump of the entire English language Wikipedia on my keychain USB flash drive for use with the Kiwix app on flights or connectivity deserts.

So yes, very old.

[horaciodos@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft I still remember the days of door-to-door encyclopedia sellers. You had the choice: one book a month or the entire collection in one go.

[nbailey@mstdn.ca]

@nixCraft I remember when The Computer had its own room

[causticmsngo@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft We had a partial set; my parents bought it one volume at a time from a grocery store. I read those suckers cover to cover.

But hanging out at the library after school was epic.

[antdude@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft i remember my folks buying me cheap Funk & Wagnall brand as a callow.

[tjc_2@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft
My were lucky to have The Book of Knowledge in our house. Many hours of reading and wondering.

[stonykark@mstdn.ca]

@nixCraft @blogdiva my parents bought one of those, the 1993 edition iirc. It was really cool as a kid to have books full of knowledge i could read any time i was bored. Then 1994 rolled around and all the info was out of date. Still neat tho, like a time capsule.

[wendinoakland@beige.party]

@nixCraft I remember having an encyclopedia as a kid, and not knowing who gave it to us. There were a couple of well connected relatives who might’ve been the source. And dial phones!

[_the_cloud@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft Someone else in the thread mentioned this, but "encyclopedia salesman" used to be a job up through the 1980s. They would go door-to-door through neighborhoods and look for families with kids. Most people couldn't afford the whole set, but you could buy a volume each month for 2 years. My parents did that. I remember using them for school papers, though I was often frustrated by how sparse and short the entries tended to be, a paragraph where I wanted at least a page or two.

[tezoatlipoca@mas.to]

@_the_cloud @nixCraft

We were fortunate to have a full set of World Book. I would be supposed to be researching a project on #Paraguay and wind up reading about Penguins, petunias, pork, plumblines, plums and partisan politics. so long as I didn't have to get a different volume.

I end up doing the same thing using #Wikipedia now. Need to look up something about an obscure thing and suddenly I'm learning about the seven thousand members of King Crimson.

[kbob@chaos.social]

@nixCraft My parents bought a set about the time I was born (1959). It was a 1952 edition; they may not have been the first owners.

I still have them in the basement, along with their wooden bookshelf. Haven't looked anything up in a couple of years. (-:

[amiserabilist@beige.party]

@wendinoakland @nixCraft

my friend was a (bad) encyclopedia britannica salesman.

he tried to sell them to my dad, even he wouldn't buy them.

[cstamp@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft I’m old enough when they became more affordable. I judged babysitting jobs based on which ones they had.

[pseudonym@mastodon.online]

@nixCraft

Ahh, the venerable World Book encyclopedia set.

And if you've ever been fortunate enough to behold the full Oxford English Dictionary set in print, service edition 1989, all 20 volumes, it too was glorious fun to read, like the encyclopedia, for new words.

[deviledeggpress@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft One of my first freelance jobs in the early 2000s was writing articles for a series of (physical) encyclopedias on U.S. history. I've always been meaning to see if any copies still exist in some public school library somewhere.