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Encyclopedias were so common they were a meme
Libraries and encyclopedias. We had a set of encyclopedias, New World I think, and much later got Brittanica on CD-ROM.
I lived in Pittsburgh during my formative years. Pittsburgh has an awesome library system, with world class libraries like the Carnegie library, and each universitie’s libraries, plus all the local libraries. I spent quite a bit of time in these. The net adds convenience, and some niche things, but it’s not the information, it’s having it in your pocket.
Also, you have to sift through a lot of bullshit.
What did you think we had encyclopedias for?!
Weapons?
Nah, that’s what the yellow pages were for. And to be able to see over the steering wheel for our vertically challenged friends. And to start fires in the fireplace at Christmas, just tear the pages out.
That’s dumb. Houses I recall from childhood in the '80s were filled with books. Encyclopedias for kids, books about animals, history, etc. Libraries were a walk away. Schools had libraries (and in my case, the librarian looked just like Janet from Three’s Company and built the same. I was at the library a lot.). TV had plenty of educational stuff.
And how’s the newfangled Google knowledge world panning out so far? Lots of people getting informed?
I grew up poor and we couldn’t afford a set of encyclopedias. We lived in the country so libraries were not a walk away. I never even thought to ask my friends if they had encyclopedias when visiting their houses and having this happen.
Encyclopedias were also somewhat limited. It could be useful if you were wondering what the main export of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was, but if you were wondering what strategy to use to beat the final boss in Ninja Gaiden you were likely out of luck (I know, I know, these are terrible examples It’s 3:30am, cut me some slack).
TV had plenty of educational stuff
Sure, but it’s not like you could be sitting there with your friend and be like “I wonder what the most common name in the world is?” and turn on the TV to the answer to your question.
Plus you weren’t always at somebodies house, you could be on a hike or at the lake and think of a question.
There were a lot of times back in the day where I would think of an interesting question and then by the time I got to a place where I could research it, I had forgotten all about it. I guess I could have and probably should have carried around a little notebook and wrote those questions down. Hindsight is 20/20
And how’s the newfangled Google knowledge world panning out so far? Lots of people getting informed?
Pretty great honestly. I can’t speak for other people but now when I have one of those “I wonder about X topic” moments I actually just look up the answer.
It even took me a while to catch up to the fact that it was now an option. I remember several times when I first got a smart phone and I would have the “I just thought of something I would like to know more about” experience and then forget that I had the ability to find out an embarrassing amount of times before it finally got to the point where it’s second nature to look it up now.
you mean houses you go to now aren’t filled with books? I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have at least a small book shelf.
Nope. Far fewer. Houses are built to be showcases for expensive appliances these days.
ah, well, I’m also of a demographic that doesn’t know anybody with a new house either.
When I moved in 2016 I didn’t have a place to bring all my books so I got rid of my bookcase and most of my books. I filled a suitcase with what I kept and I think that suitcase with what I refused to get rid of at the time. After another couple moves that suitcase kept getting lighter. Eventually if I own a house I’ll start collecting again
I had my own head to reach wrong, and life-destroying conclussions with. No AI to break me out at the time.
conclussion
/kən-klŭsh′ən/
noun
When the [probably wrong] answer, or its immediate consequence, hits you like a brick
This comic is stupid, and likely a made to farm comments and up votes, if there weren’t enough curious people willing to put in effort to learn we wouldn’t have advanced as much as we have today and no doubt Google makes looking things up easier, but look around you, how many people actually bother to even do that, plus it also makes it easier to find results that people can feed into their own misinformation, that they’ve predecided is the right answer
I thought the comic was supposed to be funny. I found it amusing. Maybe I’m just dumb lol. But I mean, I used to read the dictionary and especially the encyclopedia, go to the library, all sorts of stuff before the internet. It was fun.
I’m actually thinking about getting a full set of encyclopedias for the house so my 12 year old can use them. He just asked me as I was typing, “are moles nocturnal?” Lol.
I think it helps with spelling/critical thinking to look things up in physical books, and more importantly, I don’t have to be standing over his shoulder as he looks for information, as my son just can’t get the hang of internet safety yet…
He’s absolutely spent time reading the dictionary, he was reading it often between ages 6-8. I thought it was super adorable the first time I saw him doing it. I consider myself pretty dumb too, but being able to seek information properly is so important; “I may not know the answer, but I can try and find it” is core critical thinking in practice.
Of course, this doesn’t apply in the same way when the child/young mind is just typing the question into a chat box for an easy answer, all the while autocorrect is fixing every spelling/grammar error for them. Books man, the easiest parental control there is for learning imo
For context, this comic was made before Google changed their company motto away from, “Don’t be evil”. There was a sense that they might not turn evil back then and they were still giving reasonable search results based on your query.
The library is how people learned things before a search engine came and ruined people’s ability to find things on their own. Dewey Decimal, bitch.
And now LLMs came and ruined people ability to think. Idiocracy was a prophecy CMV.
As someone who was definitely born with internet being a standard in my house and school as a child, this is sad. I loved going to the library every week with my dad and older sister, and we both loved encyclopedias and non-fiction books about animals and stuff. Recently I had to use my college library for a practice exercise for my Eng class and once we learned the system they use (it’s not Dewey Decimal), my partner and I had a blast looking for books for our papers. It was fun, honestly. It really made me realize that sometimes the internet is less efficient for finding quality and trusted information rather than perusing the library catalogue (which I can do online too obvs).
When I was introduced to Google, my relatives were using it to look up video game cheat codes. I think we even looked up walk through for Driver. That tutorial was absurdly fucking difficult. A group of like 10 people couldn’t complete it for hours.
Libraries, man, don’t let the concept die.
You had… a dictionary at home, maybe an encyclopedia, but if you didn’t you could call a librarian and ask them if they had any reference on any topic. It took minutes when they were opened rather than seconds any time but… no ads, no tracking, serendipity yet no distraction, was it actually worst then?
Call for minutes!? That was expensive and in my small town everyone would know what i was searching for in no time.
Assuming you lived in a place with access to a library like you mentioned, that is. For me, libraries were a once a month thing growing up.
Where I am, I don’t think there are many towns without a library. I grew up laminate poor in the 90s, and even we had encyclopedias.
*I was going to say dirt poor, like dirt floor poor, and the basement was dirt and stone, but the kitchen had laminate. So it was more like post economic boom poor. Laminate poor, eh eh
I could imagine some more rural areas of the world not having access to libraries in their town, or being too broke to afford encyclopedias and other books, or having parents who don’t put importance on it. I’ve met too many parents today in that last group.
Even so, I used my school’s library more than the town one growing up. I’d hope your school had one
Encyclopedia Britannica was the answer.
I really wish this just said life before the internet.
All you needed to do was get up off your arse, travel to a library, (business hours only), and dig through a card catalog for outdated information on the subject you were interested in. Bonus difficulty: Needing to wait a week for your library to get the outdated book you needed because it was in a different town.
Today all information is available at any time-- 24/7365. Bonus difficulty: Sorting through all the AI bullshit to glean the correct information on a subject you know very little about.
Y’all heard of librarians right? They do a little more than stack books. Most are accredited professional researchers who can find what you’re looking for, or try to get it for you.
Talk to more humans and kindly please support your local libraries.
It blows my mind that people don’t know you need a master of library science to be a librarian. I still remember some reddit chucklefuck talking shit about librarians and literally stating that it’s not like they even need college degrees.
I mean I’m not gonna go ask a librarian how big of a laser I’d need to destroy the moon or why “1”+" 1" is “11” but “1”-" 1" is 0 in JavaScript
I’d appreciate those questions as a librarian. Problem is finding a publisher who was willing to print that information.
Don’t you know the Dewey decimal system?
And you still have to go to a university library if you want any scientific papers and research knowledge, because most of it is behind a paywall and only universities can afford to subscribe to the journals.
Books be like
I mean, the bar to go get a reference book to look something up is significantly higher than “pull my smartphone out of my pocket and tap a few things in”.
Here’s an article from 1945 on what the future of information access might look like.
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm
The Atlantic Monthly | July 1945
“As We May Think”
by Vannevar Bush
Eighty years ago, the stuff that was science fiction to the people working on the cutting edge of technology looks pretty unremarkable, even absurdly conservative, to us in 2025:
Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go. The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.
Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.
Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition, costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the cost of materials.
If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.
A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.
Amusingly, in a way, we are using microphotography (photolithography) to produce images on the scale of hundreds of atoms. Then we stack those images to achieve dense structures of data that can be read out electronically (flash chips).
Making a rom chip using this technology would be a lot like that encyclopedia britannica in a matchbox, except more around the size of a grain of dust. Of course we tend to make ram instead, where information is only encoded after the photolithography is done creating the structure.I’d highly recommend going down to your local library and seeing if they have any microfilm copies of the local paper. It’s kinda fun just scrolling through the years and seeing what people felt was important enough to put to print. A lot of smaller towns used to publish interpersonal gossip. (The Harringtons of 5th Avenue entertained a Mr. Somensuch last Wednesday night.)
They still do. Birthdays and funerals are also fodder for small town print papers.
That’s a neat find!
Well, where would you download them? Or if you’re talking about printed books: where would you order them? See?
Never before has anyone accomplished to make me want to throw a whole library in its entirety at them, including the building. Good job.
My town library was ridiculously small. Not everyone has the same opportunities.
But we do used books anyway, they were usually the encyclopedia, the dictionary, and text books.
This tip probably isn’t useful to you today, but in many library systems you can request a book at your local library and they will deliver it to you from some other branch that has a copy of it
I think my small public library was donation-based. Very few interesting books there, and no way to browse for and request specific books. Maybe university libraries did that.
Glad to be of service!
Back in the very early 90’s I had a salesman from Britannica show up on my doorstep. I was amenable and ended up buying a set of encyclopedias. I loved them partially because I love books, but I also loved that I had all this information at the ready even if frozen in the time when they were printed.
Now we have the internet and it’s nice and all, but I wish I still had those books.
The Britannica was one of those essential things for every home. It was like having a home computer. It contained as complete a collection of human knowledge that was possible without a full-blown library.
I remember in the 90s looking through them trying to answer a random question I had and then later on going to the library to check out more research material if the Brittanica didn’t satisfy my curiosity.
As great as the internet is, I miss running a finger across the tomes to learn something new about the world.
We had a set of encyclopedias at home when I was a kid and also one called Childcraft that was written for kids. They were great. I spent a lot of time browsing and reading them.
I feel like every house I was in had a set of encyclopedias, and a copy of “The Way Things Work”. I’m kinda ashamed I have neither in my house today.
This thread is making me want to buy an encyclopedia set.
Just checked, $1,500-2,000 for the Encyclopedia Brittanica, no longer in print. Most recent edition is from 2010…
I guess I’ll just put wikipedia on an e-reader…
Your local library is free, and i would guess they have paper encyclopedias
I grew up in a household with the Encyclopedia Britannica (and some kind of a German version of it) and at some point I and my father would look who’s faster, me on my smartphone or he with his books. For newer tropics, he didn’t stand a chance.
Not quiet an encyclopedia, but as a child I really liked The Top 10 of Everything books.
This was late the late 90s, we had dial-up, but internet was still in its infancy.
I definitely had the 1999 and 1998 editions:
Microsoft Encarta was also mind-blowing for its time, especially if your were a child in the late 90s and early 2000s.
IIRC, they no longer print it, but you can probably buy used collections.
kagis
Yeah. The final print edition was 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopædia_Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes[1] and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com
Printed for 244 years, the Britannica was the longest-running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, in three volumes.
Copyright (well, under US law, and I assume elsewhere) also doesn’t restrict actually making copies, but distributing those copies. If you want to print out a hard copy of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica website for your own use in the event of Armageddon, I imagine that there’s probably software that will let you do that.
Thanks, I do recall when they announced the last printing. Book collections can get cumbersome things to haul around in our lives and I have many already. If I ran across a more current set maybe I’d bite, but I won’t chase them down. I did already acquire the set of Great Books (classic literature and philosophy collection) that my father bought and dragged around. I’ve read some of the authors, but if I’m being honest I’d admit the 54 volumes are now mostly decorative in function and do look nice up on the shelf. I won’t get rid of them as I see their value, but that also means I have the opportunity to move them…again.
