Being raised as a German classicist, I had to write my MA dissertation with two typewriters: I typed the German text on one, leaving enough space for the Greek works, then moved the paper to the Greek typewriter to fill in the gaps; accents and breathings were then added manually in black ink. Then, in 1983 (thirty years ago!), I was lucky enough to return to St John‘s College, Oxford (where I already had spent a wonderful year as an undergraduate exchange student) as a British Council scholar, to work on my Munich Dr. phil. thesis on the Greek historian Appian. In Oxford, Susan Hockey ran a course for computer applications in the humanities (unheard of in Munich classics at the time), and Ted Brunner sent me Appian’s text as encoded in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae on a tape mailed from Berkeley. The Oxford University Computing Service in Banbury Road made these data available on its mainframe machine and allowed me to produce a concordance of all the text – well, nearly the whole text as words which were longer than 20 letters could not be processed. Should you wonder: Yes, one word in Appian is longer than this limit, and lead to the frequently repeated and highly memorable warning message „word is too long, word is parastratopedeusantos“. The Coop on Cornmarket sold a Commodore 64 with its text software EasyScript, and my beloved, then newly-wed wife, a mathematics teacher, taught the 9-needle Epson FX80 to print her hand-crafted Ancient Greek letters instead of the built-in italics. For the first time, I was able to put German and Ancient Greek on the same line without swapping typewriters!

Returning to Munich in 1984, Anne-Marie, our great friend (and role model in combining books and babies – we started our family two years later, but lost the competition with only four babies in the next seven years), allowed me to help her with an index to her thesis due to be published as a book by Oxford University Press. The self same OUP had just advertised this new software called Nota Bene, which promised not only to support alphabetic ordering of word lists, but also to print Ancient Greek. However, it required something called a PC – a very rare thing among classics students in Germany at the time, and only sold in shops full of nerds, both as salesmen and as customers, near the Technical University in Munich. So I spent the money I had earned by translating Oswyn Murray’s „Early Greece“ to buy Nota Bene, and a sizeable portion of our money (though far less than my boss had to pay for his Macintosh) for the PC required to run Nota Bene – and have been a loyal user ever since.

I‘ve followed Nota Bene through all its various incarnations: I bought a Hercules Plus Card for the version which promised enhanced screen display for Greek and Hebrew (I still have it – any takers?), perused the Big Black Book (which is still on my desk for reference), loved the yellow-on-blue version, learned how to write conversion tables for Greek and German from NB to RTF (as some publisher accepted files only in that format), enjoyed feedback from Steve himself (can you name another academic software for which the original author replies to letters, or now e-mails, himself?), enjoyed the command line input „elvis“ which an earlier version of Nota Bene had built in (and which triggered a memorable answer), moved from DOS to Windows only when Nota Bene did, and often looked forward to the erudite, humane, and often laugh-out-loud conversations (thank you, Mervyn Bennun!) on the Nota Bene list.

Nota Bene has always enabled me to put on file, and paper, exactly what I wanted to say, and where I wanted it to appear. I have written every single word I have published as a classicist with Nota Bene. I have made extensive use of the ability to have several sets of footnotes (some of my critical editions needed more than one apparatus criticus). Orbis and especially Ibid enabled the perfectionist in me to make the bibliographies in my books and essays as uniform as possible. But what I have enjoyed most is that Nota Bene is truly international: Writing in German, English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, was easy from the start, and creates perfect results on the page. The „code view“ allows me to place everything exactly where I want it on the page, without Nota Bene ever trying to override me requests (an annoying habit of other software, I am told). My first camera-ready book using Nota Bene was my Dr. phil. thesis of 1986, published (due to the a messy change in ownership of the publisher) only in 1989, and there have been rather a lot of books since. I even managed to get a camera-ready essay into the „Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik“ (ZPE 82, 1990, 25-31) as Nota Bene allowed me to follow their layout instructions precisely already 23 years ago. I have helped friends by using Nota Bene to produce camera-ready copies of their work, started to produce a yearbook for Greek and Latin teachers in the Bavarian State School sector in 2003 (an annual event ever since) and a scholarly book series, and used Nota Bene for typesetting quite a few bilingual editions of Greek and Latin classics. Indeed, for all my other publications, Nota Bene files have always been the basis, enabling the typesetters to get exactly the kind of information they need at exactly the place in the file where they need it (e.g. by using the format delta „USheader3“ to see what is a third level header and where it must appear). Copy-editing was made less of a chore thanks to Nota Bene‘s features. I cannot imagine a better, more efficient, and clearer software to achieve all this. And if we as classicists really „have been placed on earth by God to serve as a guardian of two of the three languages that God speaks“, then Nota Bene admirably helps us in fulfilling this task.

Nota Bene kick-started my academic writing, and has supported my work ever since. Words cannot express how important it is for my work, but if they could, I am sure Nota Bene would be the perfect software to put these words on paper.

kai.brodersen@uni-erfurt.de