Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Have you seen the size of the full size Oxford Dictionary?
No computer.
Wikipedia.
I'd not go back to paper or a typewriter. I had to type my reports on a purely mechanical typewriter in the mid 1970s.
Some Bible Concordances were done in about 2 years by one individual. Commentaries have taken several life times to complete. .
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What would be really annoying, after doing all that, would be a bunch of not-fake dead sea Scrolls turning up and having to start over with those included
So how many floppy discs needed for the full Oxford?
PS I worked at a computer bureau for a few months in late1970s writing typesetting code in Fortran. They did not do Bibles but they had contracts for some enormous shipping lists, encyclopedia stuff that needed annual updates. And had lots of embedded tables. The compiled fortran code drove the presses, as I recall, so if you messed up your widows and orphans subroutines or whatever and no one noticed in testing ,it would all have to be pulped and done over. Dunno why Fortran was used. It was some weird Unisys flavor, not IBM, all based on 6 bit bytes , and 36 bit words, not 8 bit. There was no concept of modular design, if a new book order came in you were given the spaghetti code for the most similar previously done book and told to hack it to fit. Head programmer had an aversion to subroutines, liked if....goto... nests. And some of us programmers had to join national Union of journalists and pay union dues, else the presses would not roll.