Encyclopædia Britannica

Written by

Michael LevyAll

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

Last updated

Oct. 28, 2026 •History

Technological changes, beginning in the 1980s with the development and spread of the personal computer and disc technology and quickening in the 1990s and 2000s through the Internet and widespread diffusion of broadband access, radically altered the publishing world generally and the encyclopaedia business in particular. In 1981, under an agreement with Mead Data Central, the first digital version of the Encyclopædia Britannica was created for the LexisNexis service. In the early 1990s Britannica was...