At 10:26 AM -0700 4/18/01, John Hudson wrote: >At 05:03 PM 4/18/2001 +0200, Marco Cimarosti wrote: > >>If Johannes Gutemberg hadn't hacked goldsmiths' punches and wine presses >>(with the vile purpose of counterfeiting costly manuscript books!) we >>wouldn't be here talking about the digital by-product of typography called >>"Unicode". > >Gutenberg went bankrupt and saw his technology taken by his >financiers, Fust and Schoeffer, who invented the publishing industry >and became very wealthy. Somewhere in that relationship is a >business plan. Fust was arrested in Paris, after somebody noticed that his books had *exactly* the same errors in each copy. He is supposed to be the (or at least *a*) source for the Faust tales because of this. >John Hudson > >Tiro Typeworks | Girls who wonder ou est la bibliotheque >Vancouver, BC | make me go all googly. >www.tiro.com | - Dean Allen, textism.com >[EMAIL PROTECTED] | I've seen differing versions of Gutenberg's business case. The one I like is that he, (like Charles Babbage, Ted Nelson, and James Cooke Brown) was constitutionally incapable of releasing a product because he kept getting Better Ideas[TM], so his venture capitalists pulled the plug on him and got a court to give them all of the assets, which their money had paid for. Two Babbage Difference Engines were built by other companies, with his blessing, but nobody has ever attempted an Analytical Engine to this day. Nelson's Xanadu project at http://www.xanadu.net says The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents. WE FIGHT ON. but I haven't heard of any progress reports lately. The board of XOC, Inc. has taken its marbles and gone ho--excuse me, has taken its Open Source code away and formed Udanax.com. It sounds a bit like the Loglan/Lojban split, with Brown claiming copyright on all of the words in his artificial language. Here, to relate oll of this at least peripherally to our list, is part of our John Cowan's listing on Amazon. The Complete Lojban Language by John W. Cowan Our Price: $48.00 Hardcover 1 edition (October 1997) The Logical Language Group, Inc.; ISBN: 0966028309 Amazon.com Sales Rank: 247,005 Editorial Reviews The publisher, The Logical Language Group, Inc. , December 10, 1997 Reference grammar for the artificial language Lojban _The Complete Lojban Language_ is a complete description of the artificial language Lojban. It serves as a reference grammar for the language, offering an overview of the language, as well as linguistic details on every aspect of the language. This book serves as the standard defining the language design. That design has been declared frozen for a minimum 5 year period; anyone who learns the language from this book can be assured that it will not be continually changing. Lojban is a current version of "Loglan", the artificial language project described in the June 1960 Scientific American article of that name. "Loglan" was also referred to by name in Robert Heinlein's classic novel _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, as well as in other novels. Loglan/Lojban is a language designed for several purposes, including linguistics research (especially involving a proposed test of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis), foreign language instruction, artificial intelligence research, machine translation and related human/computer interaction applications, and as a stimulating educational and entertaining mental exercise. Some people are interested in Lojban as a prospective international auxiliary language. An international community of aficionados has appeared, writing in and about the language, primarily on the Internet. The book is in hard cover, 620 pages long, and includes a thorough index. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist "A knot!" exclaimed Alice. "Oh, do let me help to undo it." Alice in Wonderland
