> how old are you?

[agowa338@chaos.social]

@nixCraft I have that 25+ big book bundle at home. Got it in 5th grade cause my parents were very against Internet and we didn't have it at home. But then later the same year we got it cause they got annoyed by how often teachers kept assigning homework where we had to look shit up on the internet and it ment they had to drive me to relatives for it

[fsniper@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft In Turkey newspaper's were giving out Encyclopedia's to people collecting coupons. I am one of the very fortunate ones that had lots of volumes at home. Good times. It was a blessing to go through pages.

[http_error_418@hachyderm.io]

@nixCraft I remember Encarta being mind boggling

[ericg@beige.party]

@nixCraft One of the things I loved about some encyclopedias was the transparent overlay pages which covered things like geography or anatomy.

Start with a basic page the turn the overlay and the graphics gets denser. Repeat three or four times to be fully amazed.

[nathan@ublog.hurel.me]

@nixCraft@mastodon.social old enough to remember encyclopedias were on CD-ROMs

[vinicius_py2vmh@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft I remember Wikipedia being the largest worry of teachers...

[vero@pmth.us]

@nixCraft@mastodon.social 16

[gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@nixCraft I remember my parents buying a second-hand set of early 1980s World Book encyclopedia volumes in the mid-to-late 80s and spending countless hours reading through them. Even at the time I was amused/amazed at the pace of technology where the Computer article seemed so outdated even then.

[daleoh@beige.party]

@nixCraft we had World Book at home growing up, and I spent hours lost in it. In my early twenties, I came across a full set of 1935 Funk and Wagnalls for $3. It had the Roosevelt era "modern" spellings. As a source of knowledge, it was outdated. As a source of humorous spelling, it was a gold mine.

[thomastraynor@social.linux.pizza]

@nixCraft growing up we were lucky enough to have a set at home. When my parents passed I inherited them.

[antonyo@mastodon.social]

@nixCraft 0ne of the advantages of a publically funded school system is that libraries would not have to beg millionaires. Even better to anchor that in the constitution.

[pegdhcp@mastodon.online]

@nixCraft Probably I am older, in this case. As such, sets were around 3-10 books and, especially smaller sets, were affordable. As a kid of a blue collar family I had a six volume encyclopedia at home, and it was the main information source for general matters for me, likely till the end of high school.

[mawhrin@circumstances.run]

@nixCraft oh yes. this. encyclopedia binges. my grandparents had the four-or-five volume encyclopedia from the nineteen seventies (five volumes, so more affordable, and anyways books in the-then people's republic of poland were cheaper)

[grumpydad@infosec.exchange]

@nixCraft I remember mom and dad used to buy older encyclopedias from flea markets just to have them at gome for us kids.
I also remember when the first colour TV arrived in our village.
Damn. I might be getting old...

[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.