1995 Guinness Multimedia Disk of Records1995 Guinness Multimedia Disk of Records
The world's largest lasagna? 8,188 lb. 8 oz.
The world's heaviest monarch? Tonga's King Taufa'ahau at 462 lbs.
The most hard drive space taken up by a CD-ROM? 5.7 MB.
This dubious honor may well go to the 1995 Guinness Multimedia Disc of Records.
Yes, the book we all gaped and gasped at as kids has jumped on the digital bandwagon. And its presence on your desktop is by no means discreet. The application won't run unless you put the icon on your hard drive. Once you install it, it tells you that it has to run from within the folder. You must then install the entire application folder onto your hard drive.
But if you gripe about the price, you won't enjoy the circus, so the complaining stops here.
The Barnum & Bailey-style opener is the perfect vehicle for presenting the CD-ROM of records. The curtain opens, the circus music starts and the stage fills up with record-breaking bears and balloons and tall men who cavort in a sort of virtual freak show.
But this circus is interactive. Monty Hall meets Microsoft (actually, this one was put out by Grolier, the folks who brought us the multimedia encyclopedia). You are the ringmaster. You decide what to see by choosing from the Features Screen.
World's oldest woman? Just click on the Superlatives button.
Want to see her picture? Click Photos.
In The Movies section, you can see footage of Elvis Presley (most successful musician) and the howler monkey (world's loudest animal). The list goes on-a total of eight search options that allow you to browse records, search by word, search by topic, or just explore randomly. There's even a quiz section called Guess What?
Apart from the 15,000 records and over 1,000 pictures, this Guinness archive offers video. Not only will you get a picture of some of the world's longest fingernails, you'll also witness a haircut in action that would put Edward Scissorhands to shame. If you want to avoid jerky video, you'll need a QuickTime-capable CD-ROM drive with a transfer rate of at least a 300 KB/sec.
Apart from the main screen, there's also a little video piece called "What Makes them Tick?" which features several Guinness record holders.
"I have never met a potato I didn't like," says champion potato peeler Marg Gillian, "I'm so grateful I live in Idaho. I love spuds."
Paul Miller shows off his nine-foot mustache. "I've had a lot of fun with it, and I was very proud to be in the Guinness Book of Records."
We'd be kidding ourselves if we treated this like other CD-ROM reference products. The Grolier Encyclopedia is one thing-the world's largest potato salad is another. It's fun, and if you need to know a world record, you've got it at your fingertips. But you're more likely to get it out for the same reasons you got the book out at a kid-to ogle the Siamese twins and the woman with the 13-inch waist.
For Mac: LC III or higher, 68030 CPU, 25 MHz or faster, System 7.1 or higher, 2 MB free RAM (in addition to RAM used by system), 6 MB free hard disk space, 13-inch or higher color monitor and computer capable of displaying at least 256 colors, CD-ROM drive, QuickTime 2.0 (supplied)
