I've had a standing eBay alert for the preferred 2nd. Edition CD going for
around eight years, at this point. Over that period time, there may have been
innumerable false alarms, with one or two valid auctions that the alert pointed
me to, which I missed due to having been away at the time and finding out too
late. Some years back, I did contact a couple of the book and CD dealers
listed in the XyList OED treatise, but they only seemed to still offer the much
later editions. Rather hard to find the *old* CDs. This is exactly the sort
of item you could luck into, if you stumbled across the right garage sale. But
good luck with that.
I even contacted a list member off-list, to inquire about the possibility of
duplicating a CD. This is a type of favor I have done for others in the past,
when there is no good or ready alternative. Anyway, as I told that list
member, I completely understood if -- as in that particular case -- there were
ethical qualms about doing this. It's not as though I had some aversion to
purchasing the CD, if any of those dealers actually had the version I was
looking for. But, at the same time, this is not something I regard as being
important enough to justify spending hundreds of dollars on.
More recently, I located what purports to be the sought after edition of OED
(?), but someone has used tools to convert it to DICT format. (Yeah, that
format was a new one to me as well.) The claim is that this will make it much
more accessible than the original ever was, free of the former limitations,
etc. Other (but free) software is then required to access it. However, I
doubt that would equate to a similar access by Xy. Maybe this is not really
much of a problem, given the multi-tasking we now take for granted on latter
day computers ? For sure, it would be nice to simply jettison the maze of
install and access issues detailed in the XyList treatise. Otherwise, I'm
wondering if some reverse tools may exist, for taking DICT format files back to
their original CD incarnation ? Some internet searching on that topic has not
turned up anything, yet.
Jordan
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