Encyclopedia Britannica on CD-ROM dropped in 1989 and basically turned every ’90s PC into a mini library. Instead of lugging around 32 volumes, you got the whole encyclopedia on one shiny disc, searchable in seconds—a huge deal back when dial-up was your only “Google.” Britannica kept updating it through the ’90s, with major refreshes in 1994 and 1997 that added multimedia like images, audio, and even video clips, making it feel futuristic at the time. By the early 2000s, it had pretty much peaked before the web and Wikipedia made it feel like a relic, but if you popped that disc in today, you’d instantly remember how wild it felt to have the world’s knowledge on your desktop. Fun fact: the current (early 2026) “pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz2” dump for English Wikipedia (current revisions only, no talk pages, no images) is reported as over 105 GB uncompressed, which would take about 150 CDs to hold.