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

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from Harmon Seaver  Tue, 11 Mar 1997 18:27:30 -0600 
 
I don't disagree with anything you say. Clearly, the data on CD-ROMs can be 
copied to other media (that's what I was pointing out). I'm merely suggesting 
that the OED in book form will still be basically current and certainly useful 
when devices that read CD-ROMs are remote memories. It's a valid argument --
albeit outweighed, IMO, by the temptation of the search engine. In the long
timeline, which is the view of OED, "high" language doesn't really evolve that
much. What changes is speech, "talk". The First Edition, begun in 1882 and
finished in 1928, is still eminently serviceable. When you consider that between
the Supplements to the First Ed, published through 1976, to the Second Ed (1988),
only 5000 words were added to the dictionary, that's a mere 1% addition to the
OED's base of 500,000 words. And you can be sure that they're mostly techno or
garbage words, falling either in the who-cares category or else intensely
obvious. What OUP added in the 2nd Ed. were modern quotations, in the main.

If anybody has any info about alternative (or hacked) search engines that work
(and not with the SGML Ascii text "magnetic tape" version that institutions are
licensed to run, but with the ISO 9660 CD), I'd be grateful to hear from them. I
suspect that Waterloo University in Canada has such a beast, and it's free too,
although AFAIK it only runs on Unix/Sun/Solaris/Sparc/Linux machines. Dorothy
mentions the OpenText engine; the one bundled with the CD-ROM has no name (that I
see), but was written by AND Software b.v. of Rotterdam. Waterloo's engine is
called I-search. Is OpenText available to the public? Again, it needs to crack
the OED's proprietary squashing algorithm...

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Robert Holmgren 
holmgren@xxxxxxxx 
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