Windows Software for Bible Study

Beginning of article

1. INTRODUCTION

Bible software has come a long, long way. The procedure for doing computerized biblical studies in the late 1970s began something like the joke about the recipe for elephant soup: "First, catch an elephant." There were no publicly available texts of the Bible, so one had first to devise a coding scheme and type in the data to be searched. There were no standard search mechanisms, so one had to code the search program in a language such as Fortran, C, or Pascal. Many computer systems were batch processors; running a query meant loading a stack of punched cards into the hopper and going out for lunch while waiting for the program to reach the top of the queue and …