Remember back in the day when data was sold on CD-ROMs? You remember, they had all of the great content and were sold by the millions? From what I am seeing here in this article, the CD-ROM is truly a lost art.

I was reading today about how Wikipedia is going to release a CD or DVD of all its content. Very cool idea.

This got me reminicising about “The Golden Age of CD-ROMs.” Remember when CD-ROMs were the big thing? From, say, 1996 to 1999 or 2000. Remember when Encarta and Cinemania amazed you with the depth of their content?

I remember Encarta 95. Man, that was amazing. Pictures, video, a little trivia game — I had a double-speed CD-ROM drive, and could get lost in Encarta for hours. I remember too that it had an update feature, where you could dial-up to the Internet and it would download new versions of articles that needed to change. The first one to update was the article on Yitzhak Rabin after he got assassinated. I was blown away.

And Cinemania — that was a really great product too. Thousands of reviews from Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin, video clips, star biographies — I could blow an afternoon just exploring. Cinemania was what got me hooked on Roger Ebert. (I still read him religiously, and he’s emailed me twice. Once in response to this post over on my personal blog.) [Read the rest]