In the mid-90s, I couldn’t be the only kid who gave a speech to parents to sell the value of home PCs.
If you are the lucky one in the mid-90s, you will have the experience of Encarta, Microsoft’s CD-based interactive encyclopedia. My son was taught how to study a subject (penguin, if you must know) to bring this iconic meaning of the 90s back to my mind, which is undoubtedly like how a jewelry thief teaches his children how to make plans. Reveal the past robbery. For me, Encarta is more than just an impressive archive of information. This is part of a tortuous plan that made me who I am today.
It used to cost a lot of money. Ordinary children cannot get the Encarta CD, but then a magical thing happened: it was bundled with many new PCs. When I was 12 years old, I understood this fact to a large extent. This is how I convinced my parents to get a PC that can play games. This is how I became a PC gamer.
This is what the kids wanted in the mid-90s.
If you didn’t exist in the mid-90s, or you were too young to work as a person, then this is the era before the Internet era-it was not until the late 90s/early 2000s that this became the mainstream of the family. If you need to do research on things like science, you need to read a book or hope that your parents know everything about electromagnets. Some families have printed encyclopedias on large bookshelves. I am not interested in those things because they do not fit my grand plan.
I have watched “Doom”, “Doom 2”, Allied Command, “Here”, “System Shock”, “Magic Carpet”, “Syndicate” and other movies, and I really want to play these games. Unlike game consoles, they are expensive, but they cannot be saved for a long time, and they are several years behind the release schedule. Unlike game consoles, PCs used for games feel like an impossible dream. At that time, my friend played a Roger Rabbit game. It was too difficult to look back on that game, but this is an example that I couldn’t play. FOMO did exist in the 90s, although usually because the cousin had something you wanted, such as SNES.
Encarta is a PC-based encyclopedia that I use at school. It is fair to my 12-year-old me, but I definitely use my education as a Trojan horse. I (it should be said, my brother) wanted a PC to play games, so I started sales.
Unfortunately, the actual handwriting and drawing presentations have long been shattered, but they include things like “we will get better results”, “you can save time without going to the library”, “save money on books, “And “The school computer is always busy.” I remember putting these papers on my parents’ bed and calling them to listen to our lecture. I think, to slaughter the lamb. They can never resist. They didn’t, but there was a price to pay.
Indeed, this is how most children use Encarta, even if it is very difficult.
I am a little sad that PCs were and are still very expensive to a large extent. My parents use Radio Rentals (another relic from a bygone era) to buy PCs for a monthly fee. I do use Encarta often, but honestly, this is mainly for playing Mindmaze games (Hello, Mindmaze fans!). We also seem to have spent a disproportionate amount of time setting up the loud and slow Dot matrix printer that needs to take images from Encarta and put them in my textbook. Guilt aside, this PC may not be as powerful as my kettle now, which puts me on the path of PC gaming. At that time, the PC gaming world was an exciting place.
Even when game consoles such as PlayStation started outputting 3D graphics, the allure and seemingly limitless potential of the PC meant that I was stuck in upgrade and adjustment holes. Why play games when you only need to adjust settings for a few hours? Why do you still play games when you can circle the upgrade content in the “Computer Shopping” magazine? Thanks, Enkata. You accidentally turned me into a PC nerd, and I got rid of this pain ten years later.
