Mastodawn

> how old are you?

I am old enough to remember encyclopedias coming in 25+ big book volumes &the only place to find and read thme was the school library.

No normal family in my country could afford a full encyclopedia due to cost, but some grants or rich folks with good fortune donated such books to our school library. Reading was fun in young days and seeing even many black and white pictures helped in those books take trips into the future or past. Good times & so many memories.

@nixCraft I remember this, *and* being blown away when it started coming on CDs - how could you fit that many books on one disc?!

Klaus Frank Mar 31

@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 :p

@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.

Have Hope.Mar 31

@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

Advanced Persistent Teapot Mar 31

@nixCraft I remember Encarta being mind boggling

@nixCraft old enough to remember encyclopedias were on CD-ROMs 😅

Vinicius (PY2VMH)Mar 31

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

atlauncher Mar 31

Tim Chase Mar 31

@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 Even at the time I was amused/amazed at the pace of technology where the Computer article seemed so outdated even then.

Thomas Traynor Mar 31

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

CarbonShifter Mar 31

@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.

flere-imsaho 🇺🇦Mar 31

@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 🇺🇦🇵🇸Mar 31

@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 Mar 31

@nixCraft
That's why I always thought that Wikipedia was one of the biggest achievements of the internet.
Free knowledge to everyone.

Mike Harrison Mar 31

@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.

Julien Avérous – 🇫🇷🇪🇺🇺🇦Mar 31

@nixCraft Ah yes, and the index was so big it was itself spread in multiple books 👌

Fazal Majid Mar 31

@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 Mar 31

@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.

Noah Bailey Mar 31

@nixCraft I remember when The Computer had its own room

@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.

@nixCraft i remember my folks buying me cheap Funk & Wagnall brand as a callow.

Diabolic Preacher Mar 31

@nixCraft that excitement of picking the A volume and learning about Aardvark in details more than a dictionary would explain or even a pictionary.. then came internet. and ever changing wikipedia pages

@nixCraft
My were lucky to have The Book of Knowledge in our house. Many hours of reading and wondering.

stony kark Mar 31

@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.

Spiritual Annie ☮️Mar 31

We had the prior year's set at home, donated by a neighbor who had a bit more money than we, when they'd buy a new set.

Wendroid 🇺🇦Mar 31

@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!

@wendinoakland @nixCraft

my friend was a (bad) encyclopedia britannica salesman.

he tried to sell them to my dad, even he wouldn't buy them.

Ken McLeod Mar 31

@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.

Third spruce tree on the left Mar 31

@_the_cloud @nixCraft

We were fortunate to have a full set of World Book. I would be supposed to be researching a project on #Paraguay and wind up reading about Penguins, petunias, pork, plumblines, plums and partisan politics. so long as I didn't have to get a different volume.

I end up doing the same thing using #Wikipedia now. Need to look up something about an obscure thing and suddenly I'm learning about the seven thousand members of King Crimson.

@nixCraft My parents bought a set about the time I was born (1959). It was a 1952 edition; they may not have been the first owners.

I still have them in the basement, along with their wooden bookshelf. Haven't looked anything up in a couple of years. (-:

@nixCraft I’m old enough when they became more affordable. I judged babysitting jobs based on which ones they had. :)

Pseudo Nym Apr 1

Ahh, the venerable World Book encyclopedia set.

And if you've ever been fortunate enough to behold the full Oxford English Dictionary set in print, service edition 1989, all 20 volumes, it too was glorious fun to read, like the encyclopedia, for new words.

erstwhile Apr 1

@nixCraft . . *All* screens were black and white. Period. Seatbelts were not a thing.

Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴‍♂️📷 🗺️Apr 1

I remember an encyclopedia salesperson trying to sell a set to my parents. The sales line was that it was less than the cost of cigarettes, as if they were going to give up smoking to get me an encyclopedia.

RantingCanuck Apr 1

I was fortunate; my grandparents had bought my father and aunt a set in the 1960's and kept purchasing the yearly update book right up through my childhood in the 1980's. There was a dedicated cabinet in their home for them.

Virginicus Apr 1

@nixCraft I’m old enough to remember a comedian laughing about how there were 1.3 phone numbers per person in Washington DC.

GarretSidzaka Apr 3

@nixCraft
I was blessed enough to have a full encyclopedia
I read the heck outta that thing

I grew up in southern Illinois, USA in the 1980's in a poor family, but my grandfather bought us a set of encyclopedias from a door to door salesman. It might have been World Book, but I can't remember. I spent a lot of time reading them and it was probably my first experience of "going down a rabbit hole." I think about it sometimes when I open 15+ tabs from a Wikipedia article that I only intended to look up one quick fact.

I owned a half dozen full encyclopedias. I gave them away.

Now with the state of Internet resources being full of politically motivated false information and myths pawned as history, I wish I had kept those encyclopedias.