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Dinosaurs received great reviews in general and sold fairly well, setting the stage for future Microsoft CD-ROM releases. You can explore dinosaurs by species, see where they lived by location on a map, and even watch narrated cartoon videos about them. Microsoft Dinosaurs (1993)Īs one of the earliest Microsoft Home CD-ROM products, Microsoft Dinosaurs set a template that later titles followed.
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Let’s take a look at a handful of those titles below. “They’re adding really good titles every few weeks.” “You can’t afford to be without a current Microsoft Home Products catalog,” he wrote in 1995. A generation of kids grew up loving them, and industry critics, such as Byte columnist Jerry Pournelle, recommended them. Benj Edwardsīut Microsoft’s CD-ROM products were well-received, and they filled an essential gap between the reference book era and the internet. Today, with resources like Wikipedia and YouTube at our fingertips (thanks to the internet), it’s hard to imagine a time when companies produced rich multimedia reference products frozen in time on CDs-even for people who lived through the era. For some titles, Microsoft used material licensed from publisher Dorling Kindersley (DK), which is known for its richly illustrated educational reference books. They often involved audio narration, music, and short video clips. Led by Patty Stonesifer, the Home brand would encompass hardware products like mice and dozens of entertainment and educational titles.Įach Microsoft CD-ROM title was a lavish production, with hyperlinks between slides of interactive information. In a time before the internet could deliver unlimited research materials to your PC, the CD-ROM medium, with its massive 650 megabyte capacity per disc, promised to bring large reference works and multimedia to home computers.Īfter the successful release of the Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia in March 1993, Microsoft launched the “Microsoft Home” brand under its consumer products division in October of that same year.
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In the 1980s, Microsoft pushed heavily for the future of the CD-ROM format, even organizing the first major industry conference on CD-ROM in 1986.