Re: Celebrating the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Maria Pantelia, and the Beginnings of Classical Digital Humanities | Society for Classical Studies

Marianne McDonald wrote:

> Yes....you noticed. I'm that Marianne McDonald.

Yes, we did notice, and three cheers for you. We fling digital bouquets in
your general direction.

Beneath the arduous business of establishing definitive digital versions of
ancient texts, there has been a lot of artisanal grunt work in making them
visible on physical devices. Who does not remember the headache-inducing
task of trying to read a text in raw beta code? The heroic messiness of
ancient Greek, a language that routinely puts three marks on the same
letter (plus apparatus criticus), has long been the force that pushes
display technique forward.

I got into this game early with a crude method for writing ancient Greek on
a Commodore 64 computer and printing it on the then universal Epson
printers, at first the awful 8-pin machines whose output looked like
something off a supermarket till roll, and then the quite acceptable 24-pin
system which produced quite a legible result. When the price of the
ordinary IBM-compatible PC had fallen far enough to make it affordable by
mortals, it was  possible to match this with a screen driver that produced
legible Greek on the old DOS text screen.

Despite the technical superiority of the Mac at this time, Apple's smug
insistence using its own coding and systems for everything gravely retarded
its suitability for ancient languages, and they still aren't up to speed
with the full character set of Biblical Hebrew, available as standard in
Windows 10.

But it has always been Greek pushing the way forward and, as someone who
has been in this business since the early 1980s, I am very glad that the
compulsory Greek I was exposed to at school in the 1950s has allowed me to
join this enjoyable game.

RH