First posted on 6th May 2007
Quite a few years (around 1999 to be a little more precise) ago I started specifying what I grandiosely subtitled “A Discworld Interactive Encyclopædia [sic] on CD ROM”.
I had all but forgotten about it until the other day when I came across a hard copy in a pile of old papers and other assorted rubbish that tends to accumulate beside any computer I work at. That prompted me to start hunting on my various backup CD’s and folders to see if I still had a copy in electronic form. What I came across was this Word document from 2002 – the last time I made any changes as it is identical to the hard copy. In 2003 I was still interested enough in the project to contact Stephen Briggs to see if he would like to see what I had written and whether it had any relevance to a project I believed him to be working on at the time. Luckily for everyone he turned me down. However, I feel enough time has passed for me to present the document to the world for everyone to have a laugh at, especially as nothing similar has been produced by Stephen or Terry Pratchett himself.
When re-reading the document what struck me the most was how similar to a Wiki it is, though I was ignorant of the term throughout the period I was working on it. I have absolutely no idea whether it would have worked – my web skills were virtually nonexistent at the time & I haven’t gone over it more recently as there’s no point in updating something that’ll never get implemented. I also never foresaw the ubiquity of broadband and web based content as throughout I refer to it being on a CD-ROM. I only mentioned DVD-ROM once and I’m pretty sure that it was a late change. In my defence I have to say that the title was meant to have a double meaning – referring both to the Discworld and the fact that the encyclopaedia was on a disc.
* And yes I know its lame – but what can you do?
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