RE: OED, CD-ROMS, Hard drives, etc.

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from "Thomas A. Robertson"  Thu, 6 Mar 97 14:42:31 UT

Your description of your virtual CD-ROMs was interesting. You mention many of
the benefits; but you hint that there are some downsides too. What are the
latter?

BTW, did you discover a way to get the OED software to accept a lookup argument
from an external application? I'd like to launch the OED, and the lookup itself,
by pointing at a word in XyWrite and hitting a button (a la Random House
Unabridged)... OED apparently has it built-in for MS Word via DDE, but
won't cooperate with any other apps to that extent. Otherwise, it looks like a
formidable engine to me. Finding words by their definition, among other
things... Searching for quotes by date or author... Searching the whole text in
numerous ways... Wow.

Peter Evans mentioned some current pricing. Note that Amazon's
"consistently low price" (as they boast) on this item is in fact the suggested
List Price, $395 (?250 in the UK), since prices were halved on 1 September 1996.
Strand's price is $319.95, and that's the lowest I could find; the copies they
stock now have the latest Windows v3.1+ software (v1.13). If you want to run it
off a hard disk, you can; you need a slightly different version of the software,
free from an 800 number tech support office in NYC. The most serious criticism
of buying anything on a CD-ROM is that, in all likelihood, in 10 years or so
CD-ROM readers will be antiques. The hard disk offers a longer life
expectancy, IMO. If anyone is interested, there are three URLs to check:

http://www.oup-usa.org/oed/oed2cdfaq.html (The OED2 CD-ROM FAQ)
http://www.oup-usa.org/oed/index.html (The Oxford English Dictionary,
 Second Edition on Compact Disc On-Line Brochure)

Plus, there's apparently an in-progress on-line lookup engine,
under construction at http://www.oed.com/


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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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