My first position at Microsoft back in January 1995 was a dev on the Encarta team, shipping Encarta 96.  I wrote features like the Timeline and some of the InterActivities.   I owned much of the overall app design because Enc96 was a rewrite from C to MFC/C++, and I had written a number of larger MFC apps.  I was also the multiplatform guy - I did the 16 to 32 bit port (Enc96 shipped for Win 3.1 and for Windows 95), as well as making the code run on Mac OS 9 via WLM (the Windows Libraries for Mac).   Only about 3% of the code was different between all three platforms.

After Encarta 96 I did various features on 97 including making the 32 bit version run on Win 3.1 via Win32s.  We had initially decided to abandon 16 bit development and Win 3.1 because they platforms had diverged too much; but then we didn't want to walk away from Win 3.1.  Thus I did a three week crash project to stand up Encarta 97 on Win32s and fix all the various issues like thunking the 32 bit media playback system to work on the underlying 16 bit system.

After that I became the lead of the newly consolidated tools team; we built a new in-house content management system for use by Bookshelf, Encarta, and Atlas.   This project was a lot of fun and new things for me - HTML front ends, SQL back ends, parsing, media management, content builds systems, etc.   I did that for a couple years, then went back to be the dev lead for the Encarta Reference Suite 2000 product; this combined Bookshelf, Encarta, and Atlas together on one DVD with shared content search.  

For 2001 we rewrote much of the product to stop using MediaView as the content rendering system and switch to Trident, and to combine the Encarta Encyclopedia and Encarta World Atlas codebases together, folding in a subset of the Bookshelf content.  The entire content pipeline (starting from the aformentioned content management system -> content build system -> on disk / DVD content stores -> runtime access -> rendering & layout) was written from scratch.  This was the last generational change for Encarta.

For 2002 I was the dev manager for the team; we shipped 2002 DVD products as well as redesigned / rewrote much of the online sites using ASP.NET.

Great people, great product, great times.  I feel pretty sad that it's coming to an end now.  Encarta had it day and now that day is past.  Truly all good things do come to an end.