On Fri, 15 Apr 2022 at 15:37, Phil Smith III <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yes to the editing!
Indeed. Smells like a self-published book that badly needed an editor -- even just a proofreader or spellchecker. > The Xerox I learned PL/C on was a Xerox 530, a midrange that my dad bought > for the nascent Arts Computing Office at University of Waterloo, which he was > creating to bring computing to the Arts faculty. At the time, UofW had a > 360/75 and a /44, but those were in the Math building and inaccessible to > Artsies. > > He had started in computing in the 50s working on machine translation for The > Government (read: CIA), a failed project that led into another failed project > to do the same thing at IBM Yorktown in the 60s. At CIA, he was the linguist, > and would tell a programmer what he wanted a program to do; the programmer > would write it out on autocoder sheets, give it to a keypunch operator, and a > day later he'd find out that it didn't work. He figured out that if he could > learn to write the programs, it'd be faster and easier, so he did. > > That led into creating concordances, first of Beowulf (there's a throwaway > line in Annie Hall, "Just don't take anything where they make you read > Beowulf", which my family finds inordinately humorous, since we lived with > that book for *years* during this project) and then of various other things, > including Freud and Virginia Wolff. > > By the mid-70s he was at UofW, teaching linguistics, and creating the ACO. [...] Not to digress too much, but there's an interesting non technical article in The Walrus https://thewalrus.ca/how-canada-accidentally-helped-crack-computer-translation/ on how IBM used parliamentary debates data in machine translation research at Yorktown in the 1980s. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
