The Making Of

How a 1993 CD‑ROM
came back to life

One disc, and a swarm of robots reading a children's dinosaur encyclopedia.

Long before every kid had the internet in their pocket, there was a beige computer, a whirring CD‑ROM drive, and a window full of dinosaurs. Microsoft Dinosaurs (1993) was a multimedia encyclopedia of the prehistoric world — Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, ammonites and pterosaurs, all narrated, illustrated, and clickable. You learned how to say Albertosaurus out loud, what "Saurischia" meant, and why the dinosaurs disappeared.

This is that disc, brought back modern and open, so any kid with a browser can wander the Mesozoic again. Here's how a three‑decade‑old CD‑ROM became the website you're using now.

A time capsule on a disc

It started with a single file: the original CD‑ROM image, preserved on the Internet Archive — 388 megabytes of 1993, frozen exactly as it shipped. Mounting it revealed a tidy little world: 166 folders, one per dinosaur or topic, named by four‑letter codes like TYRA, APAT (Apatosaurus), and ARCH (Archaeopteryx). Inside were thousands of images, a per‑name pronunciation clip for every entry, and a master database that knew what linked to what.

Each "screen" was a single picture with the words baked right into it — title, paragraphs, and clickable orange labels, all fused into one bitmap. Lovely to look at; useless to a search engine. To turn it back into a real website, the text had to be set free.

Reading an encyclopedia, by robot

So we pointed a swarm of AI agents at it. For every entry, one agent looked at the screens — the main page, the sub‑topics, the fast‑facts box — and transcribed the words exactly, sorting them into a clean data model: name, meaning, pronunciation, period, diet, hip type, the works. A second agent re‑read the same screens and corrected the first. Finally an editor agent swept across all 166 entries at once, making the categories and labels consistent.

The robots were careful — and occasionally smarter than the disc. When one entry listed the ammonite as living in the Cambrian, the reviewer flagged it: ammonites didn't appear until the Devonian. It fixed the date and left a note explaining why. Three hundred and thirty‑three agents, in all, reading a children's encyclopedia so no one had to retype it.

Putting it back together

With the words freed, the rest is a modern, accessible website built around the original art: every dinosaur with its picture, its story, its fast facts, and a button to hear its name said out loud. There's a Classic 1993 switch on every page that rebuilds the original clickable screens, hotspots and all. You can browse by period or diet, take one of sixteen narrated guided tours, or test yourself with Dino Riddles.

What's real, and what's reborn

Every word, image, and voice here comes from the 1993 disc — faithfully restored, not regenerated. This is a non‑commercial labor of love, built to keep a wonderful old thing alive and put it in front of a new generation of kids. It is not affiliated with Microsoft, and all the original media belongs to its creators — the museums, studios, and artists named in the credits.

Now go meet a dinosaur. Start exploring →