On 1/11/06, Keith J. Schultz <schultzk@uni-trier.de> wrote:
Hi Everybody,
I hate to disapoint everybody, but there are even older "etexts" than this! Though I have to admit that back then they were not called etexts !!? They were called corpera. They were not stored on disks or such mass storage system, but on punch cards and such.
According to the intro, etext #26 was probably entered on cards in 64-65. The Brown Corpus (I'm guessing 1962, since the Wikipedia article doesn't really say) didn't really include etexts, since it was 2000 word samples, not entire texts. Given the memory size and cost of early computers, and the fact that Wikipedia says the "Brown Corpus pioneered the field of corpus linguistics", I'd like some evidence that there were older etexts.