{"id":944,"date":"2003-03-04T01:12:30","date_gmt":"2003-03-04T09:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/03\/04\/944.html"},"modified":"2003-03-04T01:12:30","modified_gmt":"2003-03-04T09:12:30","slug":"ode-to-oed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/03\/04\/ode-to-oed\/","title":{"rendered":"Ode to OED"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n

So I went to the OED site<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/cite> on a single DVD, which I purchased for I think about $40.)<\/p>\n

So I resigned myself to being OEDless.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And I just finally got a chance to try it out, and it works fine.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

But the upside is pretty darn cool: I have the OED on my computer!<\/p>\n

Thanks, Kam!<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back, I finally decided that I was willing to pay the ridiculous price of $400 to obtain the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}