> how old are you?

[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 As a source of knowledge, it was outdated.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.

[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.