The current state of the Whole Earth Catalog's online presence is a very sad state of affairs. http://www.wholeearth.com has been posting php errors for years, it has no support for ssl, it relies on Flash for core functionality, it makes no attempt for mobile support, and worst of all the archive is completely inaccessible. I find it hard to imagine that there's not enough good will in California to give Whole Earth the kind of website that it deserves. The fact that this hasn't happened makes me speculate that either there's some kind of interpersonal issue with the project, or that companies like Apple have no concern for their own origins and history.
As a young person I was given "The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog" and, leaving aside the pornographic pages and creepy through-running comic that upset me, I didn't and to this day - despite just reading the Wikipedia page for Whole Earth Catalog - don't understand what it's FOR and what you're supposed to DO with it. "It's, you know, ecology mannn". Am I supposed to order products from it? Hippy solipsism.
That exactly was the attraction of CD-ROMs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was (to the era) practically infinite storage compared to what they were used to. Before the dawn of the Web in the mid/late 1990s, CD-ROMs were a major industry with the first electronic encyclopedias and many other reference works later made obsolete by the Web.
I remember in the early 00's having access to a copy of Microsoft Encarta in elementary school.
We would have research-based projects (e.g. look up history of $topic and write 2-page "report" while citing sources).
Students were trained by school librarians how to use the Dewey Decimal system, and take out/return books.
The teachers/librarians reacted with intense hostility to my getting the required information within a few seconds, rather than needing to slog through hundreds of pages of paper reference material.
The librarians, in particular, gave stern lectures about how digital information was untrustworthy, and the ability to do research using physical books would always be a critical life skill.
I just posted the other day about how my family bought a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica, then a couple years later a CD-ROM copy of Encarta (~500x the capacity of typical 3.5" floppies?), then four or five years later it was all online. Heady times!
Also, younger folks these days haven't lived through a physical media migration.
The weirdest thing I remember about the early CD-ROM days was that everything was parallel distributed: there was a floppy version (10 disks!) that would be substantially media-cut-down, then a CD-ROM version. Because install bases don't grow overnight.
Yep. At the time, there was this huge allure to being able to hold basically an entire shelf of books and/or multimedia content on a small disk in your hand.
That was half the appeal back then in the days of early CD-ROM. Instant access to a database much larger than what even would fit on your HDD, often 30, 40 or even 20 megabytes.
Even several years later when drives were larger, it would feel like a decadent luxury to install the contents of the CD fully onto a HDD. In 1995 my computer came with a 420 megabyte, a CD would not fit even on that. I upgraded it to a full gigabyte drive a couple of years later, I still had no room for a full CD install. I had the OS, some programs and an album on mp3.
Also, that early drive speed. Everyone takes 24x for granted now, but between slow CPUs and early drives... well, there's a reason the Captain Marvel joke only played for a very particularly aged cohort.
If you wish to run it locally, I found this method that works with modern Macs [1]. You'll have to fiddle with the .img file however (I extracted it and access it from SheepShaver as a folder).
By building Mini vMac from source, and gathering ancient pieces of software over a few months, I was able to put together a fully working and practical Macintosh 7 running - on macOS, but possible to run on Windows and Linux as well.
HyperCard, SimCity Classic, Civilization, Lemmings, Berkeley Logo.. Such a joy.
Just now, I downloaded the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog from the Internet Archive, and imported into vMac. Ooh, too bad, I get a message:
> To access your files, you must mount this hard disk on a computer that has Mac OS 8.1 or later."
My vMac is running 7.5.5. Well, I'll try to extract it on host OS then import.
Same here - in the 80s. As a kid growing up on the east coast in a conservative culture, it really shaped my perspective of my worldview on the "internet", computing, permaculture, sustainability, and counter culture.
