Carlton SpotPlus+ / CITV Interactive

I found out The Way Things Work and Encarta '95 CDs at the back of a cupboard recently.

That was when you had Leonard Nimoy advertising for Time.

Then withing a few years they'd both gone bust.

You didn't need any major processing power to run Encarta, I had Encarta '95 back in the day and this was during the period in the mid 1990s where your computer clock/processor speed was doing well to get into three figures. By the end of the decade those began to rise to grant a semi decent level of performance.

Encarta 95 said it would run with these specs (bearing in mind this was 1994):



Tiny Computers went bust in 2002, the were bought by Time who kept the name going until I think 2006 and then the parent company went into administration and that was the end of Time and Tiny.

Yes, we had Encarta 95 and it always ran fine on our Windows 3.11, 486SX 33MHz processor with 8GB of RAM

Though after around 1995 it started to become hard to find software that would run properly on it. We still had that computer until 2000 though. It cost about £1500 in 1994, and it didn't even have a CD-Rom or sound card at first (they were put in the following year).

Think you mean 8 Mb of RAM, not Gb

But yes sound cards weren't standard at the time, CD-Roms were relatively new as well. But like everything else they dropped in price and came as standard, to be true multimedia setups.

They went into administration in 2005, though I think the Time brand was revived for a while afterwards (possibly as Time UK?)

Time UK was revived and it was one of those "same name, nothing to do with the previous owner" jobs.

No idea what's happened to it since, I believe its still going but has probably pulled out of this country now, there was a large wave of consolidation and other companies going out of business in the mid 2000's in the PC industry so...

The UK business was sold to Epiris who rebranded the publisher as TI Media.

I know Tiny were derided for their poor computers at high price. But I remember being amazed at all the CD-ROMs ours came with, and everything was Tiny branded down to the mousemat. It came with a desk and chair too. (I was easily impressed).

CD-ROM interfaces always seemed quite ambitious at the time, especially for the educational ones, I remember one attempting a first-person virtual reality view in a futuristic looking building where you had to click around to discover things. Seemed exciting at the time but sounds incredibly unintuitive now!

I remember one particularly impressive one where I think you could 'dive down' to look at the shipwreck of the Titanic, with a suitable user interface to match.

Anyway, what was this topic about again?

The BBC's Domesday Project pre dated the home CD-ROM interface by quite a few years, even if it did involve tacking a laser disc reader onto a BBC Micro. That laserdisc format used for Domesday was, it says here, never used again for any other project outside the scope of the BBC Micro and there was only one device ever made that could read that laserdisk format hence the mad rush to digitise the project in the early 2000's.



No idea.

Time Computers has nothing to do with TI Media - the Time that became that was Time Inc, as in the magazine Time.