Microsoft Ancient Lands

~ the goodbye ~

ancient lands sat in the part of microsoft home i can read about but cannot personally remember. i was ten in ankara when the disc shipped in 1994 with no home pc, and the part of school-reading that touched egypt or the roman empire was a tatty tarih textbook with grainy black-and-white photos of stone columns on cheap paper. for whatever reason the microsoft home reference discs did not pull through to turkish retail at any meaningful scale, and the kids around me in fifth grade were still doing their history reports out of the library copy of the meydan larousse.

ancient lands shipped in 1994 from microsoft home as a single-subject companion to encarta, covering three ancient civilizations across one cd-rom for windows. it had twenty-one animation sequences and around five hours of video content. interactive tours through pyramid construction and athenian everyday life sat under the main menu, with the roman aqueducts hidden under a side panel. the press treated it as schoolroom-friendly infotainment. the chicago times pointed it at teachers and the washington post noted that users could become wrapped up in the title's wealth of information.

no version 2 ever followed. by 1996 the catalog had moved on. dangerous creatures had shipped a year earlier and dinosaurs was on retail shelves, with the single-subject line already running thin in retail momentum. microsoft did not announce a discontinuation. the disc stayed in oem bundles for a year or two then disappeared as the wider microsoft home brand was wound down toward the end of the decade.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

ancient lands belonged to a brief category, the single-subject reference cd-rom. microsoft put out a dozen or so titles in that shape between 1993 and 1996. each one was a slice of encarta carved out to fit one suburb of human knowledge. the bet was that a family that bought encarta might also buy a deeper disc on the topic that the kid was already obsessed with. ancient lands took history. dangerous creatures took zoology. the music central edition took popular-music biography. the school-library buyer was the easiest sell in the bundle.

in fairness, the bet worked unevenly. encarta kept selling year after year, the spinoffs sold less. the school-library channel ate most of the units, the home-retail channel mostly stuck with the one yearly encarta disc and treated the deeper titles as gifts. by the time the cd-rom drive stopped being a luxury peripheral, the web had reached the point where ancient-egypt content was free and growing on museum sites for the price of a dial-up call.

~ what came after ~

nothing inside microsoft replaced ancient lands. the encarta yearbook absorbed the single-subject content gradually. the consumer microsoft home label was wound down by the early 2000s. the entire category of shelf-bought cd-rom about one topic stopped existing as a thing households bought. the actual content went out into the museum-website wave of the late nineties, where the metropolitan museum and the british museum each put curated rome galleries online for free. wikipedia finished the job by 2005 by putting an article on every aqueduct and every roman emperor, with hyperlinks instead of guided tours.

the cd-rom itself circulates on internet archive now as an emulated object. the interface design has aged into a particular 1994 style. the animations look like the kind of thing a network nightly news anchor would have called a remarkable use of multimedia technology. the actual ancient-civilizations content has been remade many times since on better engines with deeper sources. ancient lands itself reads as a snapshot of how microsoft home thought about teaching history before the web had finished arriving.

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