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When my wife and I first got married (back in the 1980s), I remember when they used to still sell encyclopedias door to door. Some salesman would come into your house and lay out an impressive presentation but they would never tell you how much you had to pay for the full set. Always they spoke in terms of monthly payments. Payments that would never end because you always had the annual updates and the updated atlas' and so forth.

Married couples first starting out were the biggest targets of these encyclopedia salesmen, because they loved to sell the fact that you were making an investment in the education of your children - even if they hadn't been born yet, they will surely grow up so much smarter with a set of encyclopedias in the house.

Yes, we did succumb and on or around 1986, we went for a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Costed us over $2,000 when all was said and done but I must say I never regretted the purchase, although I made use of them way more than my kids ever did. They sure did look nice on the oak bookshelf in my den and they got a lot of use until about the mid 1990s when computers and internet started taking over.

Around that time, I purchased the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia. Now that was a joy. Came on multiple CD-ROMs so you were constantly changing out CD-ROMs in your computer and having to wait for them to spin up. Oftentimes, they would crash the system (Win95) and you'd have to reboot the computer just to view an article. Encarta was big on multimedia but I always found the audio and video material of the encyclopedia weak. For example, the article on Beethoven would contain little snippets of some of his works, not nearly enough to get the full flavor. The article on Scotland had a film clip of men in skirts playing bagpipes. You get the idea.

I paid good money for Encarta but after a few frustrated sessions, the disks got pushed into a back corner of the computer room closet (joining the likes of Myst, Microsoft Cinema and other CD-ROM junk) where they were all unceremoniously trashed during spring cleaning a few years back.

Meanwhile, the 1986 Britannica set was donated to another family member where it is still hopefully getting some use today.