13.3
SCHOLARS’ WORKSTATIONS AND DIGITAL INCUNABULA: THE 1980s AND 1990s
English Bible. King James Version. Philadelphia: Center for the Computer Analysis of Text, University of Pennsylvania, [1986].
5.25 in. floppy disks.
The ABS Reference Bible. New York: The American Bible Society, 1991.
CD-ROM.
CDWord: The Interactive Bible Library. Dallas, TX: Dallas Theological Seminary, 1989.
CD-ROM.
By the end of the 1970s, change was in the air, but no one anticipated the amount or rate of that change. The very first printed books are known as incunabula for Latin meaning "in the cradle," or from the infancy of printing. The 1980s saw the advent of the first digital incunabula, an achievement made possible by the combination of two new technologies. The first of these, the microcomputer, did not by itself affect those concerned with reading and studying the Bible very much. The Apple II, the first computer targeted to an average individual, debuted in April 1977. The arrival of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981 caused a greater stir. Some adventurous folk began to consider moving their data and programs to the new desktop machines. After all, the full text of the Bible was only about four megabytes of data, and the text of the New Testament would fit on a handful of floppy disks. However, it was not until the introduction of Apple Computer’s Macintosh in 1984 that personal computers began to display definite advantages over their larger cousins.
The Macintosh, with its revolutionary Graphic User Interface (GUI), was not only easy to use, it was capable of displaying and editing text in non-Roman alphabets. Microsoft introduced Windows, a GUI add-on for IBM DOS-compatible computers, in 1985. Windows lacked the sophistication of the Macintosh and did not present real competition for the Mac before version 2.0 appeared in October 1987. For years, the Mac was the computer of choice for humanists, especially students of the Bible. Even with the Macintosh’s multilingual capabilities, however, desktop computers had serious drawbacks. Their data storage capacity was limited and expensive. Sharing texts of any size took many, many diskettes. Another new technology would have to be linked with the personal computer before it could truly become a scholar’s workstation.
That technology arrived when Philips Electronics NV introduced an adaptation of their highly successful digital audio compact discs (CDs) called CD-ROM (Compact Disc-Read Only Memory) in 1983. CD-ROM was capable of storing 350 megabytes of digital data on a small, sturdy disk that could be mass-produced inexpensively. These shiny plastic disks were the first practical electronic publication medium, and they ushered in the incunabular age of digital publications. However, CD-ROMs did present some problems. The legacy of audio technology in CD-ROM tended to make data retrieval inefficient and relatively slow. The physical format of the disks serves sequential access better than random access. CDs have a continuous spiral track like a phonograph record rather than the concentric, sectored tracks used on computer storage disks. CD-ROM drives are also designed to read at Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) like phonograph turntables rather than the Constant Angular Velocity (CAV) of traditional data storage devices. In addition, new standards had to be created for locating data directories and other pertinent file system information. By the end of the 1980s, the standards were in place, the learning curve had leveled, and CD-ROM publications, including biblical texts, began to appear in numbers.
In 1991, The American Bible Society produced a CD-ROM entitled The ABS Reference Library. Intended primarily as a tool for translators, The ABS Reference Library included standard versions of the Bible in several Western languages, as well as the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament. ABS had to make serious compromises for the CD to work with DOS-based personal computers. Hebrew and Greek appeared only in transliteration. The retrieval software packaged with the disk had major limitations, serving primarily to look up words and citations, and view parallel texts. Surprisingly, this lowest-common-denominator approach has given The ABS Reference Bible considerable longevity. It continues to be used around the world on very low-end computers, and copies are still available from the Society.
Another pioneering Bible application, CDWord: The Interactive Bible Library did not fare so well. Produced by Dallas Theological Seminary, CDWord incorporates tools for serious Bible study and research. The software package includes not only English versions, but also the Greek New Testament, and a full Greek lexicon. Greek characters are fully supported, but there is no text in Hebrew. Besides Bible texts, the package includes the full text of selected Bible dictionaries and one-volume commentaries. Readers can link windows containing the same text in different versions so that they scroll together. Brilliantly conceived and state-of-the-art when it was released, CDWord is a classic example of the pitfalls of the incunabular age. A Windows 2.x application, CDWord was barely operable under Windows 3.0 and failed completely with Windows95. Too closely tied to a transitory hardware and operating system environment, the original was obsolete within five years of its introduction.
Literature: Hockey 1980; Hughes 1987; Kraft and Tov 1981; Parunak 1992.