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Preface

Martin White

As you walk up Walton Street from the centre of Oxford the road bears slightly to the left and a large 19th century building comes into view. It is not an Oxford college but the headquarters of the Oxford University Press. OUP is the largest university press in the world, and can date its origins back to around 1480. In 1983 I arrived at this building carrying a Texas Silent 700 terminal. This used thermal ink printer technology and had two rubber ears on the top into which a telephone handset could be inserted to link the printer into the BT public telephone network through an acoustic coupler. A decade earlier I had used the same technology to use the first computer-based search services developed by the Lockheed Corporation and System Development Corporation.

I was heading up early attempts by Reed Publishing to develop electronically published products and services, notably airline flight timetables. Reed owned International Computaprint Corporation, based in Fort Washington, PA, which specialized in keyboarding and printing telephone directories and airline timetables. Reed had been working with IBM and the University of Waterloo, Canada on the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project, which was to create a digital version of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED seeks not only to provide a definitive definition of a word, but also the origins of when the word was first used, with examples of subsequent use which may have modified the definition. All ...