The year was 1991. Personal computing was just becoming popular and 5.25" floppy disks were all the rage. Enter the CD-ROM. There was so much more storage potential, the possibilities seemed endless. When Sony released one of their first CD-ROM drives, they packaged it with a compliation of 6 discs called the "Laser Library." I suppose if you're going to drop $1,200 on a new technology, you might as well get some stuff to play with.

One of these discs included the Microsoft's Bookshelf software. It was a DOS application that included a simple encyclopedia, a dictionary, thesaurus, quote-book, etc. I installed it on a FreeDOS virtual machine. First thing I did was try to define the word "internet." I guess it wasn't popular enough to have its own definition in 1991.

Stay tuned for more old technology posts as I dig through my library of treasures.