Thomas B. Ridgeway

[Dominik Wujastyk]

I recently found out that Tom Ridgeway passed away last year, at the young 
age of 55.

Tom started out as a Gujarati scholar, but stepped sideways into a career 
in Computing for the Humanities.  More recent indologists may not remember 
"BlackBox", the computer that Tom ran at the Univ. of Washington in 
Seattle when he was director of the Centre for Computing and Humanities 
there in the late 80s and early 90s.  BlackBox was a kind of 
treasure-trove where one could download all sorts of advanced utilities 
and fonts for Indic work that Tom created, as well as many e-texts of 
Sanskrit works.  He made transliteration fonts for Sanskrit, Tamil and 
other languages, as well as utilities and fonts for IPA, American-Indian 
languages, etc.  It was Tom in 1994 who first converted Professor 
Tokunaga's monumental Ramayana e-text into CSX encoding so that 
indologists at large could use it.

Subsequently, in late 1994, management the University decided not to run a 
Computing and Humanities centre. They made Tom redundant at very short 
notice, and summarily took BlackBox offline.  (Cf. postings to the 
INDOLOGY list at that time, e.g., http://tinyurl.com/qwhxn) Quite a lot of 
Tom's contributions were already out in general circulation, where they 
still exist and are widely used (try searching for his name in Google to 
get a flavour).

Tom and I corresponded many times; his knowledge of humanities software 
was encyclopedic, and his responses were always long, very informative, 
and cheerful.

His passing is very sad, and he will be missed.

Dominik

--
Dr Dominik Wujastyk
Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow
The Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed