© 1996 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 18, no. 5, September-October 1996, pp.14-19.
Some investments are so stunningly bad that it takes some time to fully comprehend the magnitude of the error. Having invested tens of billions of dollars on the B-2 bomber, the U.S. Air Force, for example, has been quite shy about admitting the planes do very little, and cost so much that they are too valuable to actually be risked in battle. There is a certain charming irony in producing weapons of war so precious they must be sheltered, even guarded, against actual use, though the charm wears off a bit when you think about the price tag.
But if time offers perspective, it also offers amnesia: we actively strive to forget the bad. Which makes it all the more important to admit mistakes as soon as possible, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM 2.0 (referred to hereafter as EBCD) is a mistake. Like the B-2, it is way too expensive, it has ridiculous design and performance limitations, it fails to live up to its hype, and it can’t be used as intended. Unlike the B-2, it costs “just” $1,000.00.
Siiiy Stupidities
EBCD comes in a large box containing the CD-ROM itself, a wirebound booklet of instructions on how to install it (all but a few pages are devoted to Windows 3.1; the Mac in-structions are of the usual ‘just stick it in and run it” variety), a videotape, and a dongle.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a dongle is a copy-protection device. In the PC world, these are gizmos you insert into the parallel printer port. When the copy-protected software is launched, it immediately checks for the presence of the dongle; if it finds it, all is well. If it doesn’t find the dongle, the program quits, possibly displaying some ominous message first. If you had six copy-protected programs, you’d have to have six dongles sticking out of the printer port in a lengthy, awkward daisy-chain.

Dongles are rare in the Mac world, but also a bit more elegant. The Mac dongle used by Britannica looks like a very short keyboard or mouse cable, less than six inches long, with a big bulge in it. You insert it anywhere in the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) chain – into the keyboard, into the mouse, into the back of the machine – it doesn’t matter. Nor does it interfere with anything else the Mac is doing.
It also doesn’t make much sense, either: copy-protecting a CD-ROM is silly. Nevertheless, Britannica is paranoid “hackers” will start making millions of copies, oblivious to the fact that this would suck up the entire world’s supply of hard disks and floppy disks in the process. As a general rule, I refuse to buy copyprotected software but, as the dongle does not require any special software on the computer, this seemed not so much an exception as just an annoyance, so I ignored it.
Britannica’s videotape presumably has pointers on how to use the CD-ROM. I don’t know – it was defective. After a couple calls to Britannica, I decided I didn’t really care about the videotape, and never did learn what it was supposed to contain.
Installation of the CD itself was unremarkable. Running an installer directly off the EBCD placed roughly 10 megabytes of “stuff’ on the Mac’s hard drive. Britannica doesn’t explain what the installer is installing, or why, but it didn’t seem to harm anything. Looking at this folder later, most of the contents proved to be a massive collection of tiny JPEG graphics of superscripted numbers (for footnotes), accented letters and special typography.
Difficult to Use
I first tried EBCD on a Mac IIsi with 17 megabytes of RAM, System 7.5.1, and a
If you haven’t read the documentation, launching EBCD the first time will be a shock: you are handed off to a very slightly customized version of Netscape 1.0. How it works: you double-click on an icon showing the Encyclopaedia Britannica logo. This is an application that apparently does nothing but launch Netscape, which in turn reads several small image files the installer placed on your hard drive, then reads the “home” page on the CD-ROM. In other words, Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM 2.0 consists of nothing but thousands of indexed HTML (HyperText Markup Language) pages permanently sealed in a CD-ROM.

Netscape, of course, is a World Wide Web client, not an encyclopedia. So to actually find something, you type a word or phrase into a form, press a button, and a search engine – a separate application – launches, and eventually returns to Netscape a list of links – er, articles – that might be relevant.
On the good side, this means that Britannica can provide an identical package to both PC and Mac users: the encyclopedia is a CD-ROM-based “web” site, and everyone will see exactly the same thing. On the bad side, it is slow. Very slow.
How slow? In tests done on a Mac IIsi, I found it faster to run upstairs, where our paper-based Encyclopaedia Britannica resides, to look up something than to use the EBCD. Looking up the names of 28 historical figures took over three and a half hours using the CD-ROM; looking them up with the paper encyclopedia took slightly over 30 minutes. While Britannica claims the CD contains every word of the paper set, this test did reveal a significant difference: the paper-based encyclopedia contains far more illustrations.
Curious, I moved the EBCD to a faster machine, a Macintosh IIfx (twice the speed of
I quit and read a book.
Difficult to Buy
On the good side, the EBCD is so difficult to buy that you’ll never fall victim
![Fig. 3. A search for Maryland will turn up this entry for the State of Maryland, covering its history, culture, politics, geography, economy, etc. At the top of the entry will be a bracketed hypertext link, [Image]. If you are curious and click this, you'll get the "map of Maryland" shown in Fig. 4.](https://i1.wp.com/www.nishiryu.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/britannica-maryland.jpg?fit=530%2C398&ssl=1)
![Fig. 4. Note that, while this is a poor map of New York and Pennsylvania, it is a terrible map of Maryland, Delaware or New Jersey. Clicking the [Flag] hypertext link brings up a color drawing of the Maryland flag.](https://i1.wp.com/www.nishiryu.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/britannica-maryland-map.jpg?fit=530%2C737&ssl=1)
In mid-summer 1995 the salesman called with the “good news” that a new version of the CD-ROM would be published in July, and because we were good customers, etc., we could get it at an outstanding discounted rate ofonly $499. Naturally, we could cancel out of this if the CD-ROM “wasn’t everything you were expecting.” I ordered a copy.
It did not arrive in July, nor did it arrive in August – but the billing statements did. By the time it did arrive, in late September, the billing statements were replaced by mildly threatening collection notices, demanding we submit payment for goods not yet delivered. In spite of the fact that no one at Britannica would admit to being in charge of billing, or of having the power to correct this problem, the notices stopped coming — about the same time the EBCD 2.0 arrived.
The “special deal” also proved to be deceptive: during the winter a couple of high-end specialty mail-order catalogs offered EBCD for the same price: $499. Earlier this year my credit union also offered EBCD — for $499. But if you call Britannica on the phone they will insist that a “representative” come to your home, and also insist the price is $995.


I ended up returning the package after using it extensively for a month. Calling Britannica to notify them it was being returned, the customer representative sounded depressed. I asked if they wanted a reason for the return and was told, “No, that’s not necessary. Nobody seems to like this product.”

Since returning the package, I’ve acquired a Power Macintosh 7200/75, with a quadruple-speed CD-ROM drive. I’ve idly wondered how EBCD would perform on this machine. I’ve also idly wondered what I’d do if I won the state lottery, but I’ve never purchased a lottery ticket.
And doubt I ever will.
Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-ROM 2.0
http://www.britannica.com/bookstore/cd.html
1-800-480-0552
$995 + $10 s/h
sales@eb.com