Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM 2.0: Forget the movie, buy the book

© 1996 Lawrence I. Charters

Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 18, no. 5, September-October 1996, pp.14-19.

Some investments are so stunningly bad that it takes some time to fully comprehend the magnitude of the error. Having invested tens of billions of dollars on the B-2 bomber, the U.S. Air Force, for example, has been quite shy about admitting the planes do very little, and cost so much that they are too valuable to actually be risked in battle. There is a certain charming irony in producing weapons of war so precious they must be sheltered, even guarded, against actual use, though the charm wears off a bit when you think about the price tag.

But if time offers perspective, it also offers amnesia: we actively strive to forget the bad. Which makes it all the more important to admit mistakes as soon as possible, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM 2.0 (referred to hereafter as EBCD) is a mistake. Like the B-2, it is way too expensive, it has ridiculous design and performance limitations, it fails to live up to its hype, and it can’t be used as intended. Unlike the B-2, it costs “just” $1,000.00.

Siiiy Stupidities

EBCD comes in a large box containing the CD-ROM itself, a wirebound booklet of instructions on how to install it (all but a few pages are devoted to Windows 3.1; the Mac in-structions are of the usual ‘just stick it in and run it” variety), a videotape, and a dongle.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a dongle is a copy-protection device. In the PC world, these are gizmos you insert into the parallel printer port. When the copy-protected software is launched, it immediately checks for the presence of the dongle; if it finds it, all is well. If it doesn’t find the dongle, the program quits, possibly displaying some ominous message first. If you had six copy-protected programs, you’d have to have six dongles sticking out of the printer port in a lengthy, awkward daisy-chain.

Fig. 1. After the EBCD launcher fires up Netscape, you are presented with this opening screen. You can immediately type something into the search engine ("Enter a word, phrase or question") and be off and running; in this case, we are looking for Hata Shunroku, a Japanese general. If you need help figuring out how to use the search engine, buttons and links provide on-line assistance. The "Select Reference" pop-up allows you to switch over to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Down at the bottom, the Nations of the World button brings up a political atlas, and the Propaedia button brings up an "outline of knowledge," which is exactly that: an awesome outline of essentially all human knowledge. Most curious are the (useless) Random Article button, which takes you to some place at random, and the Picture Tour, another useless option which displays the sparse, uninspiring graphics on the disc in no particular order, and with no context. One minute you can be looking at a molecule of - something - and another minute a cross section of an unidentified machine.
Fig. 1. After the EBCD launcher fires up Netscape, you are presented with this opening screen. You can immediately type something into the search engine (“Enter a word, phrase or question”) and be off and running; in this case, we are looking for Hata Shunroku, a Japanese general. If you need help figuring out how to use the search engine, buttons and links provide on-line assistance. The “Select Reference” pop-up allows you to switch over to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Down at the bottom, the Nations of the World button brings up a political atlas, and the Propaedia button brings up an “outline of knowledge,” which is exactly that: an awesome outline of essentially all human knowledge. Most curious are the (useless) Random Article button, which takes you to some place at random, and the Picture Tour, another useless option which displays the sparse, uninspiring graphics on the disc in no particular order, and with no context. One minute you can be looking at a molecule of – something – and another minute a cross-section of an unidentified machine.

Dongles are rare in the Mac world, but also a bit more elegant. The Mac dongle used by Britannica looks like a very short keyboard or mouse cable, less than six inches long, with a big bulge in it. You insert it anywhere in the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) chain – into the keyboard, into the mouse, into the back of the machine – it doesn’t matter. Nor does it interfere with anything else the Mac is doing.

It also doesn’t make much sense, either: copy-protecting a CD-ROM is silly. Nevertheless, Britannica is paranoid “hackers” will start making millions of copies, oblivious to the fact that this would suck up the entire world’s supply of hard disks and floppy disks in the process. As a general rule, I refuse to buy copyprotected software but, as the dongle does not require any special software on the computer, this seemed not so much an exception as just an annoyance, so I ignored it.

Britannica’s videotape presumably has pointers on how to use the CD-ROM. I don’t know – it was defective. After a couple calls to Britannica, I decided I didn’t really care about the videotape, and never did learn what it was supposed to contain.

Installation of the CD itself was unremarkable. Running an installer directly off the EBCD placed roughly 10 megabytes of “stuff’ on the Mac’s hard drive. Britannica doesn’t explain what the installer is installing, or why, but it didn’t seem to harm anything. Looking at this folder later, most of the contents proved to be a massive collection of tiny JPEG graphics of superscripted numbers (for footnotes), accented letters and special typography.

Difficult to Use

I first tried EBCD on a Mac IIsi with 17 megabytes of RAM, System 7.5.1, and a 240 megabyte hard drive, using an Apple CD300 doublespeed CD-ROM drive. The documentation recommends a Mac Ilci with 8 megabytes of RAM, so this seemed like a reasonable fit.

If you haven’t read the documentation, launching EBCD the first time will be a shock: you are handed off to a very slightly customized version of Netscape 1.0. How it works: you double-click on an icon showing the Encyclopaedia Britannica logo. This is an application that apparently does nothing but launch Netscape, which in turn reads several small image files the installer placed on your hard drive, then reads the “home” page on the CD-ROM. In other words, Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM 2.0 consists of nothing but thousands of indexed HTML (HyperText Markup Language) pages permanently sealed in a CD-ROM.

Fig. 2. After entering something you'd like to look up, Netscape launches the EBCD search engine - a separate application - which records its progress with this thermometer bar. It can take several minutes to complete a search (see the article for details).
Fig. 2. After entering something you’d like to look up, Netscape launches the EBCD search engine – a separate application – which records its progress with this thermometer bar. It can take several minutes to complete a search (see the article for details).

Netscape, of course, is a World Wide Web client, not an encyclopedia. So to actually find something, you type a word or phrase into a form, press a button, and a search engine – a separate application – launches, and eventually returns to Netscape a list of links – er, articles – that might be relevant.

On the good side, this means that Britannica can provide an identical package to both PC and Mac users: the encyclopedia is a CD-ROM-based “web” site, and everyone will see exactly the same thing. On the bad side, it is slow. Very slow.

How slow? In tests done on a Mac IIsi, I found it faster to run upstairs, where our paper-based Encyclopaedia Britannica resides, to look up something than to use the EBCD. Looking up the names of 28 historical figures took over three and a half hours using the CD-ROM; looking them up with the paper encyclopedia took slightly over 30 minutes. While Britannica claims the CD contains every word of the paper set, this test did reveal a significant difference: the paper-based encyclopedia contains far more illustrations.

Curious, I moved the EBCD to a faster machine, a Macintosh IIfx (twice the speed of a IIsi), with 20 megabytes of RAM. There may have been a slight increase in speed, but it wasn’t noteworthy. On the other hand, this move did lead to a spectacular error. The Mac Ilfx is used for, among other things, surfing the Internet via modem, using [at the time] Netscape 1.1. One evening I fired up EBCD to look up information on some topic. EBCD loaded, a search term was entered — but then nothing seemed to happen, for minutes. I quit the Netscape 1.0 application used by EBCD and decided to dial into the Internet. After several minutes of cybersurfing with Netscape 1.1, the keyboard seemed to freeze, the EBCD search engine popped up and, after a couple more minutes, EBCD’s copy of Netscape 1.0 appeared with an error saying it couldn’t make a network connection. At that point, I was running FreePPP, Netscape 1.0, Netscape 1.1, and the EBCD search engine, and my Internet connection had died.

I quit and read a book.

Difficult to Buy

On the good side, the EBCD is so difficult to buy that you’ll never fall victim of making an impulse purchase. Britannica contacted us in early 1995 to tell us we’d “won” a free set ofreference books in a drawing (a drawing I don’t recall having entered). The gentleman who “delivered” the books just happened to also sell the standard, paper-based Encyclopaedia Britannica and was disappointed we already owned a set. But we mentioned we’d really like to have it on CD-ROM, so he disappeared and… A few days later he returned with Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM 1.0. He proudly pointed out it worked on both Macs and PCs, and invited us to take it for a spin. I did. He was wrong: it was an ordinary Windows 3.1 package. He seemed genuinely puzzled and embarrassed, and I concluded he a) didn’t know much about computers and b) it wasn’t worth the effort to educate him. I briefly considered trying to run it under Soft Windows, but there is no place to plug in a PC-style dongle on a Mac. (Reason# 23,414 for owning a Mac.)

Fig. 3. A search for Maryland will turn up this entry for the State of Maryland, covering its history, culture, politics, geography, economy, etc. At the top of the entry will be a bracketed hypertext link, [Image]. If you are curious and click this, you'll get the "map of Maryland" shown in Fig. 4.
Fig. 3. A search for Maryland will turn up this entry for the State of Maryland, covering its history, culture, politics, geography, economy, etc. At the top of the entry will be a bracketed hypertext link, [Image]. If you are curious and click this, you’ll get the “map of Maryland” shown in Fig. 4.
Fig. 4. Note that, while this is a poor map of New York and Pennsylvania, it is a terrible map of Maryland, Delaware or New Jersey. Clicking the [Flag] hypertext link brings up a color drawing of the Maryland flag.
Fig. 4. Note that, while this is a poor map of New York and Pennsylvania, it is a terrible map of Maryland, Delaware or New Jersey. Clicking the [Flag] hypertext link brings up a color drawing of the Maryland flag.

In mid-summer 1995 the salesman called with the “good news” that a new version of the CD-ROM would be published in July, and because we were good customers, etc., we could get it at an outstanding discounted rate ofonly $499. Naturally, we could cancel out of this if the CD-ROM “wasn’t everything you were expecting.” I ordered a copy.

It did not arrive in July, nor did it arrive in August – but the billing statements did. By the time it did arrive, in late September, the billing statements were replaced by mildly threatening collection notices, demanding we submit payment for goods not yet delivered. In spite of the fact that no one at Britannica would admit to being in charge of billing, or of having the power to correct this problem, the notices stopped coming — about the same time the EBCD 2.0 arrived.

The “special deal” also proved to be deceptive: during the winter a couple of high-end specialty mail-order catalogs offered EBCD for the same price: $499. Earlier this year my credit union also offered EBCD — for $499. But if you call Britannica on the phone they will insist that a “representative” come to your home, and also insist the price is $995.

Fig. 5. One of the alleged "bonus" features of the EBCD is the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. If you happen to spell a word correctly, the dictionary presents a complete definition of the word. Unlike the paper-based dictionary, no diagrams or figures are included.
Fig. 5. One of the alleged “bonus” features of the EBCD is the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. If you happen to spell a word correctly, the dictionary presents a complete definition of the word. Unlike the paper-based dictionary, no diagrams or figures are included.
Fig. 6. Bad spellers will hate the dictionary. Unlike most dictionaries, or even a paper-based dictionary, you are stuck if you misspell something; there is no scrolling list of words that sound or look like what you want, and of course there are no pages to flip back and forth, hoping to zero in on the correct word. Note, however, that the non-result is still, strangely enough, copyrighted.
Fig. 6. Bad spellers will hate the dictionary. Unlike most dictionaries, or even a paper-based dictionary, you are stuck if you misspell something; there is no scrolling list of words that sound or look like what you want, and of course there are no pages to flip back and forth, hoping to zero in on the correct word. Note, however, that the non-result is still, strangely enough, copyrighted.

I ended up returning the package after using it extensively for a month. Calling Britannica to notify them it was being returned, the customer representative sounded depressed. I asked if they wanted a reason for the return and was told, “No, that’s not necessary. Nobody seems to like this product.”

Fig. 7. Another EBCD "bonus" is Nations of the World, an electronic political atlas. But it is just a political atlas; it is entirely text-based. While it would seem like a Good Idea to have, perhaps, a map of the world as a launching point ("click on the country to see more information"), the user is presented instead with this unattractive alphabetical listing of country names. If you don't happen to notice that Ivory Coast is under Cote d'Ivoire, even the alphabetical listing will give you trouble.
Fig. 7. Another EBCD “bonus” is Nations of the World, an electronic political atlas. But it is just a political atlas; it is entirely text-based. While it would seem like a Good Idea to have, perhaps, a map of the world as a launching point (“click on the country to see more information”), the user is presented instead with this unattractive alphabetical listing of country names. If you don’t happen to notice that Ivory Coast is under Cote d’Ivoire, even the alphabetical listing will give you trouble.

Since returning the package, I’ve acquired a Power Macintosh 7200/75, with a quadruple-speed CD-ROM drive. I’ve idly wondered how EBCD would perform on this machine. I’ve also idly wondered what I’d do if I won the state lottery, but I’ve never purchased a lottery ticket.

And doubt I ever will.

Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM 2.0
http://www.britannica.com/bookstore/cd.html
1-800-480-0552
$995 + $10 s/h
sales@eb.com