Second, because computers were still thought of as workplace devices, they very rarely had sound or video capabilities. There were just two problems, Corddry says:įirst, since this was before the Internet became popular, Microsoft was having a hard time convincing book publishers, video studios, or really anyone with skin in the game that people would ever want to access information on a computer. They weren't exactly sure how people would access this information - the web was just being invented and the broader Internet wasn't popular yet - but they were sure it would happen, somehow.

In the early 1990s, Microsoft saw the way the world was going and knew that the PC had tremendous potential for multimedia and access to information in classrooms, offices, and homes. 'We knew from the beginning that we were a temporary business, eventually to be overtaken by the internet,' Corddry says. In hindsight, they seem like oddities: Why would Microsoft, a company best known for making word processors, spreadsheets, and operating systems, make what was basically a reference library for the PC?īut according to Tom Corddry, who was in charge of Microsoft's multimedia projects from 1989 to 1996, the company had a clever master plan to push computers forward in the time before they were taken for granted. Those Microsoft Multimedia offerings included 'Magic School Bus,' 'Microsoft Dogs,' and the 'Microsoft Encarta' encyclopedia. If you went to grade school in the nineties like I did, you might remember Microsoft's educational software titles published on CD-ROM.

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