Do you remember… Encarta?

Before most homes could look anything up online, there was Encarta: a whole encyclopedia on a CD-ROM, with sound clips, videos and articles you could click between. For a homework project in the nineties, it felt a lot like cheating.

Microsoft first published it in 1993, and a new edition arrived every year with more articles, more pictures and another round of grainy little video clips. You could hear famous speeches, find out what a whale sounded like, or follow links from the Tudors to volcanoes to the Moon landings until the homework was long forgotten.

And then there was MindMaze, the quiz game hidden inside, where you answered trivia questions to open doors in a medieval castle. It was easily the best use of homework time that wasn’t homework.

Free, endlessly updated Wikipedia finished it off in the end. Microsoft stopped selling Encarta in 2009, and the discs went where every CD-ROM goes: into a drawer.