In the early 90s back in England, London, my Year 2 teacher, Mr. Drake, had a classroom PC that introduced many of the other students to early Windows-based programs, and he had many fun games on countless floppy disks students could play if they did well in class.

I’d been around many different computer systems already, most DOS/Acorn/BBC Micro, but his Windows-based system became more familiar for day-to-day use, with a large mouse with a trackball that I found fascinating. I recall it had internet access, and he had introduced emails to us in a simplified explanation, then sent an email to what I can only imagine was a colleague at some other institution. “It’s like sending a letter,” he told us, only near-instant. Many of my peers were interested, but more interested in playing Lemmings or King’s Quest than sending an email, since who would they send one to, exactly? I had several “computers” at home, but not a true PC, but thankfully my request for a Windows-based PC was met with a yes, and later in late 1994 I had control of the “Family PC” essentially to myself with Windows 95.

Unfortunately, I did not get online until mid-1995, but until then something else was my internet. Let me introduce you to Encarta 95.

Now, I was already an encyclopedia enthusiast, often reading any I could get my hands on, absorbing everything from start to finish for knowledge and entertainment, but Encarta was a whole different bag.
There were countless images, audio, and video clips to accompany the vast articles on various subjects and topics.

Essentially, I had a “web/Wiki” of knowledge for the digital multimedia age at my fingertips via this disc I would religiously place into my CD-ROM drive daily after school with some snacks. Encarta ’95 also had an intuitive interactive game called a medieval trivia game called MindMaze that I played religiously and would often try to get my friends to try when visiting, before eventually having them ask if we could go on the SNES instead.

Also, don’t get me started on game console releases “back in my day”—they were not in unison with other nations, as using the Super Nintendo as an example, “we” got it a year after the US did. Imagine release timelines like that today; people would riot.

Encarta for years ahead and similar software/websites later became, in a sense, the ChatGPT of the day, as some students when given a homework assignment would copy and paste the text from Encarta and present the work as their own rather than using it for research. How some of my fellow students would think they could get away with this plagiarism is beyond me, but not much has changed today.

I truly enjoyed this period of time. However, as stated, around May 1995 I had an external 56k dial-up modem purchased for me and permission to use the line to connect to the internet using one of the ISP providers (Pipex and UK Online) initially, and well, that changed everything from there on.

That was until I was banned for a year and came back with a vengeance, starting buying my first domain names and eventually helping the BBC get BBC.com, but this is a story for another day.

Regards,

Alexander / Zenchi