WhereIsAtlas · Software
Microsoft Encarta
The encyclopedia on a disc that taught a generation to look things up — until the open web made it obsolete
Defunct — Microsoft's CD-ROM encyclopedia launched in 1993 and became the best-selling reference work of the disc era. It was killed not by a rival encyclopedia but by the internet: Microsoft announced the end in March 2009, as free, vast, constantly updated sources — above all Wikipedia — made an annual disc edition pointless.
Microsoft Encarta was the company's CD-ROM encyclopedia, first released in 1993. It packed a full reference work onto a disc: thousands of articles, photographs, diagrams, sound clips, video and an interactive world atlas, all searchable from a home computer. Much of the earliest text was licensed from Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, then rebuilt with multimedia around Microsoft's own interface — including the MindMaze quiz game that became a favourite in classrooms and family living rooms.
It arrived at exactly the right moment. Through the 1990s CD-ROM drives became standard equipment on home PCs, and Encarta became the best-selling of the disc encyclopedias, ahead of rival products from Britannica and Grolier. New editions shipped every year, alongside spin-offs such as the Encarta World English Dictionary, Encarta Reference Library and Encarta Africana, and Microsoft put Encarta on the box as a reason to buy a new computer.
What killed it was not a better encyclopedia but the network. As broadband spread through the 2000s, a free, enormous, constantly updated reference became available to anyone with a browser — Wikipedia, launched in 2001, grew faster than any publisher could print or press a disc. Search engines made a curated, fixed set of articles feel narrow, and a yearly CD could not compete with a page that had been edited minutes ago.
Microsoft announced on 30 March 2009 that Encarta would be discontinued. Encarta Premium 2009 was the last edition; sales of the software stopped and the Encarta websites were closed. Some of its content was folded into other Microsoft products and into its search engine Bing, and pieces of the reference material lingered for a while, but the brand was finished. Britannica, its old rival, survived by going online and eventually ending its print edition in 2012; Encarta belonged to a company with other priorities, and simply stopped.
Encarta is remembered now as a specific kind of casualty. It was not mismanaged or beaten by a competitor's product — it was a packaged, finite thing in a world that had just become infinite and free. For anyone who grew up in the 1990s, the sight of that disc going into a drive is one of the most vivid memories of early home computing.
Quick facts
- Launched
- 1993, on CD-ROM
- Original content
- Licensed largely from Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia
- Peak position
- Best-selling CD-ROM encyclopedia of the 1990s
- Signature feature
- Multimedia articles, interactive atlas and the MindMaze quiz game
- Notable spin-offs
- Encarta World English Dictionary, Encarta Africana, Encarta Reference Library
- Announced end
- 30 March 2009
- Final edition
- Encarta Premium 2009
- Killed by
- Wikipedia, broadband and the open web
- What replaced it
- Search engines and free online references, including Bing
Sources
- Microsoft Encarta - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-15)
- Microsoft closing the book on Encarta — CNET (2026-09-15)
- Victim of Wikipedia: Microsoft to shut down Encarta — The Guardian (2026-09-15)
- Encarta — Britannica (2026-09-15)