Some time after I finished my first book, I decided I would never write another. Copying, editing, editing, copying again, trying to remember what I’d already said and where; it was all just too much for me. I thought I could manage articles but no more than that. Had that decision held, I’d still be where I was then.

Then the computer and Nota Bene arrived together (1983). The computer was an XT and the Nota Bene was 0.9 (a beta version of 1.0). I learned the dir  command and se / / on the same day and they were for me virtually indistinguishable from each other. DOS was what made Nota Bene work. My first computer was one of the first with an EGA [enhanced graphics adaptor] card, so that I could show different languages on screen.

I quickly decided that I could write more books and the world has been a poorer place since then.

Each of my ten books so far has been written on a new version of Nota Bene; the program which has been so much a part of my life has grown with me. And my imagination of the kind of research I could do has grown with the program.

First there was just Nota Bene, then there was Nota Bene with SLS (Special Language Supplement; we’re still in the DOS ages). Since I was living in Israel at the time I decided to become the distributor for NB with SLS in Israel and found a partner who was the HP distributor there as well. “The Last Word,” as our business was called, produced a program called Shappirit (Dragonfly, but also “Beautiful Write”), which never made a penny for either of us but, at the very least, made possible two of the most important works of Jewish Studies in the twentieth century: Michael Sokoloff’s dictionaries of Bablonian and Palestinian Jewish Aramaic, produced entirely in Shappirit, up to camera-ready copy. Sokoloff was still using Shappirit well into the twenty-first century. The thought of writing in English and Hebrew in any other program was then–and still is: let anyone using Word try it–my room 101.

In the meantime, however, Nota Bene had moved on. First there was Ibid. I had no idea what it was going to be good for when it started (I have little imagination) but now can’t imagine how one lived without it. At every stage of NB development, I was happy with the version I had and distressed at the thought of it changing, but then, at every stage, I became thrilled with the new version, and couldn’t imagine how I had lived before it, but surely not wanting it to change again.

And now we are 10, and I can’t imagine living without it and surely don’t want it to change again.

Somewhere in the meantime, NB like every one else moved to Windows (from DOS). This was necessary but also has proven, once again, to have inestimable benefits over the years, not least the possibilities of cutting and pasting from other Windows programs into NB and from NB into other programs (Yes, somewhere in those decades I learned that computer and NB were not entirely coextensive.)

The attentive reader will have noted, no doubt, that I have had little to say about the Textbase or its descendant, Orbis. Truth is, it took me more than a decade to figure out what to do with it (now I can’t live without it). For me Orbis is an integral part of the Word Processor (what we used to call an editor), or better, I should refer to the whole complex as a Text Processor. Gathering data–frankly and narcissistically, more often than not from my own work–, massaging them into new texts, rewriting, editing, producing new texts have become a seamless process owing to the perfect (nearly) integration between the different components of Lingua Workstation.

Well I’m up to book number 10 and NB is up to version 10.

It is the tool of my life and I hope to write many more books, Inshallah, using NB 10 (can’t imagine it getting better now).

Be well all

db