It was with some nostalgia and sadness that I noted the death of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica last week. It's yet another casualty of our rapid move to a digital world. The EB survived for 244 years, but interest was clearly not there for a set of books costing more than a thousand dollars that was out of date before it was off the presses.
I started to think about the evolution of encyclopedias and remember all the CD-ROMS I had in the past that were filled with information and seemed such a wonder. My first memory is the Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia. It came out in 1987, a few years after the first Mac appeared. It survived through several editions, but was taken off the market in 2003.
