Subject: Message from Dave Curry

From: George M Cathey <gmcathey>
Date: Wed, 08 Apr 87 00:23:51 EDT

Date: Mon, 6 Apr 87 07:47:54 EST
From: [email-masked] (Dave Curry)
Message-Id: <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Webster

The dictionary files were corrupted out on the NIC; they finally fixed
this back around Christmastime.  To get the new files, FTP to SRI-NIC
and log in as anonymous.  Change to the directory "W7".  Then get all
the files whose name ends in "DICTION".  The other files (INDEX.LST,
PRONUNCIATION.TXT, etc.) are all there also, but none of them changed,
so there's not much point in FTP'ing them (they're huge).  Note that
it took me two evenings to ftp this much data (19 MB); maybe you'll do
better.

Also, I did massive amounts of work on webster over Christmas.  The
stupid "INDEX" file and the habit of the server taking up 1.3MB on
each call has been deleted in favor of a database method.  Also, many
miscellaneous buglets have been fixed.  You should probably grab the
latest version by using anonymous ftp to ee.ecn.purdue.edu and getting
the file "pub/webster.tar".  Make sure you set "image" mode for the
transfer.

The protocol looks reasonably interesting I guess.  I'm not sure about
the "format" mode though.  It would be a MAJOR mistake to start hard
coding things like terminal types into the program.  FORMAT-MODE should
just mean "format it for a dump 80 column terminal" like it does now.
If they want graphics or something, let them get it in RAW mode.

--Dave

---

From: Michael Halle <halazar>
Date: Wed, 08 Apr 87 01:07:42 EDT

We are running the latest version of webster that is available, which
includes silly bug fixes that davy doesn't seem to want to put in to
the real version, but that break things on AMT.  

						--Mike