Free Software: Encarta Encyclopedia

At its 2008 peak, contained over 62,000 articles and a massive library of multimedia assets.

Encarta was born from Microsoft's internal project in the late 1980s. After being rejected by Encyclopædia Britannica , Microsoft licensed text from Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia for its initial 1993 release. Encarta Encyclopedia Free Software

: Starting in 2000, a subset of the full encyclopedia was available for free online, supported by advertisements. At its 2008 peak, contained over 62,000 articles