Online encyclopedias

I’m working my way through a memo from April of 1982 – just before Bob Stein and Alan Kay, then at Atari, were to meet with a team from Encyclopaedia Britannica to discuss a project of making an electronic encyclopedia. This project never came to fruition – Atari’s fortunes went south with the video game crash in early 1983 – but there are a lot of interesting details. Here’s a passage from a memo that Bob wrote outlining the current landscape:

This surprised me! I wouldn’t have thought encyclopedias were available online in 1982! And not just any encyclopedias: even the Encyclopaedia Britannica was online. But there are some caveats as continuing to read makes clear:

Back then NEXIS (which was for news) was separate from LEXIS (which was for law) – but that price tag is surprising, and you can see why there wasn’t a public market for it. The other thing, I’d imagine, is that an hour on Wikipedia today would be wildly different from an hour on one of these services – screens would have probably been 80 x 25 characters if you were lucky, and most modems would have been 300 baud – which means, if my calculations are right, you’d be getting 42 characters a second, or maybe 150kb per hour, which would load a third of the Wikipedia page for modem.