As a total beside-the-point ... probably the most interesting computer project I ever did was one that I did for (believe it or not) the Poet-In-Residence at our University.   This gentleman was engaged in a study of spelling variations in the published texts of Shakesperean sonnets.   No, I was not one of the poor-schleps who had to type it all in.   (Those were the graduate students.)   Instead, I wrote the programs (in HP2000 Timeshare BASIC) that analyzed them.

It was fairly remarkable, in those days, to be using the computer to process the data.   It was the first string-parser I ever wrote.   (And the first in a handful of times my name has been listed in the acknowledgements of a formal academic paper.)   I would have loved to have had Perl, and a computer powerful enough to have run it, but all that was still a gleam in Larry Wall’s eye.

And, I tell you, it was quite fascinating.   There were no dictionaries; no standard spellings.   There wasn’t even a standard for how a particular letter sounded.   People wrote what they heard.   So, the texts became a record of “what they heard,” and thus, of how they spoke.   Much of the text was very much like the last sentence in Mark Twain’s essay.   As you see from the essay, you can’t “sight-read” text like that.   (This would one day be the gift from Noah Webster.)   But you can pronounce it, and when you do so, you hear a voice and a person from the very distant past, speaking.

Our Poet-in-Residence, in addition to being pretty darned savvy about the potential for using the computer, truly was a scholar who could engage in fascinating conversation for many hours.   His depth of knowledge and passion for the subject was easy to see.