I like to glance through people’s bookcases. Some people have books tucked away, but usually the main reference books are in the loungeroom _ a dictionary or two, an atlas, an encyclopedia and perhaps some hobby reference books, like Marine Invertebrates, Birds of Australia or the Joys of Chainsaw Sculpture.
But the computer is tucked away in an study or kid’s bedroom.
More reference books are going to CD-ROM _ the little silver disk that can hold the words in books that would take six-metres of bookshelf.
We have a problem here. The computer is in the study but the reference book is needed in the lounge.
As you put down the J on a triple letter score to form an obscure word, you can hardly invite everyone into the study while you crank up the CD-ROM drive containing the mystical 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary.
As you challenge the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question your opponents will not wait while you crank up the CD encyclopedia.
Economics will make the reference books disappear. For the price of a serious encyclopedia in book form, you can buy the computer and the encyclopedia on CD. Britannica is not on CD yet, silly people.
So in the next few years families with pre-school children now contemplating the standard references their parents gave them will look seriously at the CD option.
CD is much better to use than books. It searches and cross-references far more quickly.
So where will this computer go? In Jilly’s bedroom. And what happens when Johnny wants to use it, too?
I think we will start to see the lounge room computer, whose screen doubles as a television screen, with CD-ROM drive. Johnny and Jilly will each have their own computer, perhaps networked.
Isn’t this creating a world where kids with rich parents will have an educational advantage over the kids of poor kids who cannot afford all this hi-tech gadgetry.
No; not at all. That world already exists, and has done so for some generations.
Indeed, there is a solid argument for saying computer (especially CD and modem) technology is bringing more information more cheaply to more people. (We will leave knowledge, understanding and wisdom out of this for now.)
For the past two weeks I have been playing with the Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on Compact Disc on loan. It is $1500, which is less than a third the cost of the 20 volumes. (Phone 03 6464200 for more details).
Work that would have taken days or years of patient looking up can be done in minutes. It has half a million words with etymology and two and half million quotations.
The joy of the CD is you can cross-reference so quickly, searching not just the head word, as with traditional book dictionaries, but searching within the text of definitions and the text of quotations.
It will devalue the work of those struggling semiotic researchers who picked through thousands of entries in the OED and elsewhere like free-range chooks.
(Incidentally, the first reference to semiotics is in 1625, giving it a strictly medical meaning, as in a symptoms or signs of disease. It is only much later that it is used with reference to language and later still that lunatic latter-day semioticians argue that the language of Rinso ads is as important as the language of Hemingway.)
The dictionary displays foreign language characters, permits searches using wildcards, standard and/or language, and on authors of quotations.
We learn that vibe is an abbreviation of vibraphone, first used in the Sunday Times and followed by Rolling Stone and John Lennon.
Then you can search for all of the quotes from John Lennon throughout the dictionary and learn that he was a great populariser of neologisms.
Alas, that joyous creation of John Clarke, “”farnarkling”, is not there, despite by desperate attempt over the past five years to bring it into the language, with a slightly wider meaning than Clarke’s imaginary sporting game. “”Farnarkling” is the engaging in useless activity instead of getting on with the essential task. It will appear in the third edition of the Macquarie in 1998 and the third edition of the OED in 2005, if the lexionographers stop farnarkling and get on with recording the living language.
Surely, these half a million words would make the OED useless as a spell checker because ad, od and jo are words and would not be highlighted as errors. Scrabble would be reduced to a game of guesswork. And all these quotations and etymologies would get in the way of the simple job of looking up the meanings of words.
All true, if you use the whole dictionary. But the CD technology allows the instantaneous cutting down of the dictionary to a more manageable work.
It can be cut by date. From 0 to 1950 for purists, or from 1700 to 1989 for people who want to avoid the archaic.
It can be cut to just the words and meanings, or just the quotations, or just the etymologies.
It can be cut to only words that came to English from Russian, or Finnish or whatever.
And it can be cut to include only certain parts of speech: only nouns, adjectives and verbs, for example.
It is as if all the other entries are pulled out of the books and 20 volumes compacted.
It is a mighty tool, a joy to browse and an extraordinary illustration of the point that CD-ROM drives in computers are not just toys for space invaders and idiot games. And even in the purely educational context, CD-ROM offers more than just the multimedia fizz of having the encyclopedia entry on “”volcano” actually erupt and make explosive noises.
As an aside, I note Oxford has a stack of other electronic publications, nearly all of which are on floppy and get loaded on to the hard disk. These include the dictionaries of quotations, the Companions to English Literature and English Language, the works of Austen, Shakespeare, Chaucer and various scientific reference books.
It would not take many to fill a hard disk of 80 to 240 megabytes. Clearly the CD with 600 megabytes is the way to go. It is faster and stops piracy.