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From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.misc
Subject: Re: A dictionary for UNIX systems
Keywords: Dictionary
Message-ID: <9184@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 9 Feb 89 06:18:52 GMT
References: <11113@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 52

In article <11113@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> thors@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU ('Olafur
Thorsteinsson) writes:
>I posted this to the places I thought would be most likely to be able to
>give me info (of course, where else would I put this).  I hope I found at
>least one good spot.
>
>Is there a good on-line dictionary available for UNIX systems out there?
>If so, where can I find out more about it?
>Are there many, and then which one can you recommend?
>
>Many thanks for your time and responses.

The MIT Student Information Processing Board has in our software
library an on-line dictionary whose data files, I believe, consist of
Webster's Seventh Unabridged Dictionary, or something like that.
The dictionary works on a client/server model, with the database
living on the server and users running the client to send work lookup
requests to the webster daemon.

I am currently the maintainer of the software.  The only place I've
ever seen it compiled and used is on 4.3BSD, so I don't know what
other strains it will work on.  Also, when I inherited the software it
had been modified by the previous maintainer to use Sun Remote
Procedure Calls, rather than direct network socket connections, for
client/server communcation.  The RPC code is supposedly #ifdef'd so
that you can turn it off and fall back on socket code, but I've never
used the socket code so I don't know if it works.

Besides a text client and a server, we also have an xwebster client
which runs under the X Window System Version 11, and I am working on
rewriting that client to use the X toolkit since the old version isn't
very reliable on things like color displays.  In fact, it breaks them.

Finally, there's an awful lot of cruft in the webster source tree
whose purpose I simply have not had time to figure out, let alone
clean up.

If there is enough interest, I will tar and compress the whole source
tree and make it available for anonymous ftp from the SIPB's
timesharing machine, charon.mit.edu.  If you are interested in
acquiring the sources, please send mail directly to me and let me
know.  If I manage to make the sources available for ftp (Give me a
while, classes just started here! :-), I will post a follow-up message
to this one.

Finally, if you get the sources from me, and you make
improvements/fixes in them, PLEASE send me patches!

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
MIT Project Athena				410 Memorial Drive, No. 223F
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Office: 617-253-4261			      Home: 617-225-8218