I've long held the opinion that the multimedia encyclopaedia on CD-ROM is the "killer app" that got Windows PCs into EVERY home. Sure, people already had IBM compatibles working their way into homes because people were getting the same stuff for home as they had at work, for compatibility reasons, and some of the justification for that was the whole "the kids can use it for school" argument. Neither Atari nor Commodore made a strong push for CD-ROM on their most common machines. Sure you could go a super high end Amiga 4000 with a CD drive, but I genuinely think it should have been a pack-in standard accessory on the A1200. Lots of kids already had an Amiga on their desk for games, and occasionally typing things up, but they all got swept off the desks and replaced with Windows 95 PCs with a copy of Encarta. If the A1200 had a CD-ROM in-box, and if there were a multimedia encyclopaedia on it, Microsoft would have ad a hard uphill fight for that desk space, I think. Commodore and Atari seemed determined to make the worst decisions at every turn, though, and I don't think CD encyclopaedias would have saved them from all the rest of their foolish decisions (like Atari betting the farm on the Jaguar when they had the Falcon 030 ready to smash the competition in the computer space), but I think the transition from a diverse computer market to basically just one option, the Windows PC, would have been a lot less abrupt. It's like in 1994, every friend had a fundamentally different computer, I blinked, and in 1995 we all had basically the same Windows 95 PC.
Because they ran off the CD and not installed on the HD, these discs weren't updatable. Given the small HD capacities and the slow internet speeds of the day, it would have been impossible to update. You were stuck with the supplied disc.
Great review...I had the same experiences as you
I've long held the opinion that the multimedia encyclopaedia on CD-ROM is the "killer app" that got Windows PCs into EVERY home. Sure, people already had IBM compatibles working their way into homes because people were getting the same stuff for home as they had at work, for compatibility reasons, and some of the justification for that was the whole "the kids can use it for school" argument.
Neither Atari nor Commodore made a strong push for CD-ROM on their most common machines. Sure you could go a super high end Amiga 4000 with a CD drive, but I genuinely think it should have been a pack-in standard accessory on the A1200. Lots of kids already had an Amiga on their desk for games, and occasionally typing things up, but they all got swept off the desks and replaced with Windows 95 PCs with a copy of Encarta. If the A1200 had a CD-ROM in-box, and if there were a multimedia encyclopaedia on it, Microsoft would have ad a hard uphill fight for that desk space, I think.
Commodore and Atari seemed determined to make the worst decisions at every turn, though, and I don't think CD encyclopaedias would have saved them from all the rest of their foolish decisions (like Atari betting the farm on the Jaguar when they had the Falcon 030 ready to smash the competition in the computer space), but I think the transition from a diverse computer market to basically just one option, the Windows PC, would have been a lot less abrupt. It's like in 1994, every friend had a fundamentally different computer, I blinked, and in 1995 we all had basically the same Windows 95 PC.
What did you do before the internet and information at your fingertips? Went to the library
Because they ran off the CD and not installed on the HD, these discs weren't updatable. Given the small HD capacities and the slow internet speeds of the day, it would have been impossible to update. You were stuck with the supplied disc.
For me it was those DK kids Encyclopedia CDs that came out a bit later, had them at school and I think we got a demo CD with a packet of cereal
I hadn't thought of those. *heads straight on eBay to look*