Author: Carey
Date: 13:16:12 11/11/05
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On November 11, 2005 at 15:08:12, Joshua Shriver wrote: >I've done some OCR in the past, nifty technology. Didnt know if there was a >specific project that was going on. I'd be willing to OCR some code if someone >needed the help. I can let the computer burn away the scanner while I'm coding >on the weekends :) Thanks, but I'm sure they wouldn't want to send their sole surviving copy to somebody they don't know... (Meaning you or me, etc.) It's the same situation with some who have their program on old, fragile tapes. It's the only surviving copy and they definetly aren't going to be willing to loan it to anybody they don't know and / or trust. In these cases, the ComputerHistory.Org people would be more trustworthy, but they certainly aren't in a position to do all the tedious typo correcting etc. that you have to do with a scanned & OCRed program. (Normal OCR programs use spell checkers, and that works okay for regular human language stuff, but programs and variables etc. totally confuse them.) There are one or two people who, if they could find the printouts, might be talked into sending it to somebody for scanning (assuming they don't have a scanner themselves), but the OCR stuff is very annoying. I'm certainly not going to ask them to do that. (That's why I was so surprised when Robert Hyatt offered to do it for Blitz & CrayBlitz! Of course, I'm sure he's doing it because he too wants a copy of them.) To be honest, at this point, I haven't really asked them. I've just accepted that they don't have a readily available electronic copy and gone on to the next person. Of course, by now, I've tracked down about everybody I can think of that is likely to be trackable. There are a few people I can't find any trace of, and others that I found way too many people to even guess who might be the right one. (I'm not very good at these kinds of searches. I'd never make it as a professional researcher or investigator.) And I refuse to start doing random phone calls to potential authors. I know how annoying phone calls can be and I'm certainly not going to start doing that to people I'm trying to ask a favor of! I've reached a point where I'm just sitting back waiting for something to arrive. I've got several programs promised, but nothing has arrived. And that's discouraging. You'd think that at least one of them would show up in a couple months.
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