Ode to OED
A while back, I finally decided that I was willing to pay the ridiculous price of $400 to obtain the OED on CD-ROM. It had taken me a couple of years of waffling to reach that decision, but I was tired of having to rely on friends who owned the thing (or who had subscriptions to the online edition), and I think they were getting tired of it too.
So I went to the OED site, where I was chagrined to learn that although the Macintosh version of the CD still existed, it was being sold only in the UK. American customers could only purchase the Windows version.
Later, the Macintosh version was discontinued entirely. The Windows version is still available, but that doesn't do me any good. The web-based version is available on a subscription basis, for only $550/year; somehow paying nearly $50/month for access to a dictionary, no matter how important a dictionary, seems excessive to me. (By contrast, for example, I have the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on a single DVD, which I purchased for I think about $40.)
So I resigned myself to being OEDless.
Kam to the rescue! Kam picked up an old battered used copy of the Macintosh version somewhere and gave it to me. Unfortunately, the reader software came on a floppy, and I no longer have access to a Mac floppy drive. Fortunately, Kam does have such access, so she copied the floppy for me.
And I just finally got a chance to try it out, and it works fine.
The downsides are many: it runs only in Classic mode, the interface is incredibly clunky, the fonts are ugly, it may require having the CD in the CD drive to work. (I'll experiment with that.)
But the upside is pretty darn cool: I have the OED on my computer!
Thanks, Kam!