The short, happy reign of CD-ROM

harrymcc writes: Over at Fast Company, where we’re celebrating 1994 Week, I wrote about the year of Peak CD-ROM, when excitement over the medium’s potential was sky-high and the World Wide Web’s audience still numbered in the extremely low millions. I cover once-famous products such as Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia, the curse of shovelware, the rise of a San Francisco neighborhood known as “Multimedia Gulch,” and why the whole dream soon came crashing down.