| This is the Atari ST conference. Last I knew, the 800 and Atari's other little
computers are discussed in ASG3::ATARI8.
I have seen a Bible for the Atari ST at The Compuer Bug in Hadley. However,
this was the "King James Version", which being written in an obscure ancient
dialect of English, is not suitable for evangelism or other public use in
areas of the world that use the current American dialect of English. The
King James Version has the advantage that there is no Copyright on it, and
is therefore a popular on-line find. However, the language is so difficult
for the inexperienced reader to understand, that the net result of using
the King James version is that people who turn to it to find out more about
God are either turned away by the difficulty, or misinterpret what's
actually there. For example, compare REV 1:14 in King James versus Today's
Englis Version, then tell me, is Christ the creator (yes), or the first of the
created? (no). I am personally convinced that the widespread use King James
translation is one of Satan's tools to keep the REAL truth about God obscure
in America.
On the other hand, I have been given a direct mail solicitation for an MSDOS
software system that includes NIV and is soon to include NAS, both of which
are good translations. If you think you might want to try and decode their
disk format, I can look up the information. It was offered at the introductory
price of $99, and was geared towards teachers of the Word and similar folk.
The Computer Shopper often has classified ads that offer the Bible on-line.
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| -- I don't want to discuss this here !!! ---
Jeff,
I took my KJV Bible I have here by my desk and looked up REV 1:14 as you
posted. It says
"His head and *his* hairs *were* white like wool, as white as snow; and his
eyes *were* as a flame of fire;"
It talks of neither Christ being created nor his being the first fruit of
the Creation. As I would like to read your intended example, could you
please check that reference and let me know what it is?
Thanks
Chad
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| Sorry - it's Rev 3:14. I don't know how that "1" got there.
On the general topic of on-line Bibles in various translations (which I
think is appropriate here, sorry about the KJV rathole) I had a VERY
interesting discussion with a person who was selling a on-line Bibles
via the wand-ads in the Copmuter Shopper.
I don't have the name or number handy, but he has a KJV for $9.00 (for
MSDOS only, of course), and said in his ad to call about NIV. I spoke
to him at some length, and as I suspected, the only thing holding up
the NIV release was the issue of royalty to the Zondervan company which
owns the copyright. As of Friday evening, the NIV was not yet
available. Same goes for all other modern translations. The NAS
required a $5000.00 fee plus $10.00 a copy - beyond the range of the
small churches and companies that get into the on-line Bible business.
When I inquired about data format, he explained that the data was
highly compressed, and required their MSDOS program (or equivalent) to
decode. Therefore, without PC-DITTO, these programs aren't much use to
Atari-ST people, even if we are willing to write our own search/inquire
program to access the data, since we would need to know the compression
scheme.
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| We have the bible in CSCMAS, or at least most of it.
Look in CSCMAS""::sys$msdos:[bible]*
These files are in ascii and can be read by the ST.
What is really needed is a highly usable file reader from an archeived
file format, with complete search and print capibilities.
The program LIST in msdos world reads, searchers and prints ascii
texts and Narc will read, search and print the whole document from
an ARC file.
The atari needs the same or similar capibilites.
Anybody wanna' take this task on.
A basic program could do it, but faster languages exists for this
task.
DCOPYXX will do that too. I'm not sure the latest version will search
from an archive format though.
The person that writes a LIST like program will do the ATARI community
a great service. LIST is almost a must for my long text seraches
(up to full memory).
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