Indology Research desk

[Dominik Wujastyk]

A widely-admired workstation was designed for classical Greek scholars
some years ago.  David Packard (Packard Humanities Institute) was the
force behind it.  It was called the Ibycus Workstation and could display
and process fully accented ancient Greek (and Latin), and had a
blindingly fast text search engine blown into a chip so that it could
find anything in the TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Grecae) in a nimi.sa.  The
people who could afford one loved it.  As far as I know, it died from
platform-specificity.  It was the best tool for the job, but
unfortunately that wasn't enough to make it a lasting success.

Any design of a platform for Indological or Asian studies should take
into account the history of the Ibycus, its strengths and weaknesses.

A serious modern platform probably needs to be implemented purely in
software (ANSI C), and to be portable across a number of operating
systems, including at least Unix (Linux), OS/2 and perhaps Windows.

Dominik