Scott Brim <swb@theory.tn.cornell.edu> (05/01/91)
How would people rate various commercial online encyclopedia offerings, e.g. from Compuserve? Ease of use and downloading, cost, whatever. What I'd really like is something with good Mac graphics -- are there any with graphics features? Alternatively, what about encyclopedias on CDs? Thanks much ... Scott --------------------------------------------------------------------- Scott W. Brim swb@nr-tech.cit.cornell.edu Cornell University Ithaca, NY
mfn@cbnewsi.att.com (mark.f.nettleingham) (05/02/91)
In article <SWB.91May1094754@mitchell.cit.cornell.edu>, swb@theory.tn.cornell.edu (Scott Brim) writes: > How would people rate various commercial online encyclopedia offerings, > e.g. from Compuserve? Ease of use and downloading, cost, whatever. I have been using the Random House Encyclopedia offered for the Mac for about a month now. This encyclopedia is distributed on seven 800 K disks. It requires about five megs. of free disk space to install. The interface is completely textual and the articles are very short. For example looking up ant yields a short article containing just the very basic information. Scientific name, size, six legs, three sections, and the fact that they live everywhere on the earth. There was more information on specific types of ants (Fire ant, carpenter ant, for example). The interface does provide a menu to jump directly to related articles. Now to be fair, the bound version of Random House Encyclopedia version is also short (two maybe three volumes at most). And it is relativity inexpensive (I paid $67.00 for it). On a scale of one to ten with ten being the best I'd give it a about a five. I don't think I would purchase it again now that I have used it for a while. I would also be interested in hearing from people that have used one or more of the CD-ROM encyclopedias. Hope this is of some help, Mark Nettleingham ...!att!probe!markn