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

On 6/28/19 6:52 PM, Ralph Hancock wrote:
> 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.
THANKS, RALPH.
>
> 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.
YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT.
>
> 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.
WOW! HISTORY.
>
> 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.
YOU'RE SO RIGHT.
>
> 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.

WOW...I HAD A CHOICE, BUT CHOSE GREEK OVER BIOLOGY (IN HIGH SCHOOL) 
BECAUSE I DIDN'T WANT TO DISSECT A FROG FOR BIOLOGY.

THAT WAS HOW I GOT INTO GREEK, AND HAVE NEVER REGRETTED IT SINCE. STILL 
AN ANIMAL LOVER. BUT ALSO ADORE GREEK LITERATURE, PARTICULARLY THE THEATRE,

> MARIANNE