The Cyc is a PC CD-ROM containing the following material relating to the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Home Computer:
If you take a page from a publication and scan it, the result is a bitmap file, usually in .tif format. You can display the original text, but the quality of the display depends greatly on the quality of the original, and the quality of the scanner. Since the file is a bitmap, there is no concept of text.
CaDD takes each bitmap page and uses Caere Omnipage to convert the image to editable text. This text can be corrected, and additions can be made to it. Example: Bruce Harrison wrote a program called Scud Busters. What is the origin of the name "Scud"? In the review of Harrison's product is a footnote showing the derivation of the name.
The editable text is reformmated using a standard style and output as Adobe .pdf files using scalable fonts. This means you can take any .pdf document in The Cyc and zoom it to the maximum size that a .pdf viewer, such as Adobe Reader, can display, wihout loss of text quality. CaDD even uses scalable chess fonts so that articles displaying chess positions scale correctly too. By contrast, a bitmap image becomes more "blocky" the larger it gets.
While the CaDD process is tedious and time-consuming, there is a huge over-riding benefit to it: The .pdf files in The Cyc can be searched with a full text search engine. This means, that within seconds, you can find all references in The Cyc's documents to say "The Gramulator." You can then click on the reference and display the original text. CaDD uses a product from dtSearch to do this. However, many of its features have been incorporated in recent versions of Adobe Reader, which is a free download.
To improve the hit rate of a search, CaDD uses a style book to ensure that all text references to a product are edited to be the same. Example: CaDD style is Extended Basic or XB, not Ex-Bas, Ext. Basic, Xbas, xbas, or X/B. The Cyc includes the style book developed by CaDD.
The Cyc costs $24.95. The price includes shipping and handling anywhere in the world. Please order from the address below.
CaDD Electronics
45 Centerville Drive
Salem, NH 03079-2674
** You must be a registered PC99 owner to order The Cyc. Many of the files on The Cyc are copyrighted, and permission from the copyright owner has been granted to allow their use with PC99. **
Form of payment: We accept personal checks and money orders in US dollars. For personal checks we usually ship next day.
Credit Card Orders: We regret that we do not accept credit cards. The size of our business and the cost of the overhead make the use of credit cards uneconomic. Similarly for PayPal.
Orders from outside the United States: Most customers send us a bank draft. This can usually be purchased from one of the larger banks in your country. Your bank will have an arrangement with a US bank, which forwards us the draft. Some Australian customers have purchased money orders through the Australian Post Office, or Western Union. Some European customers use Giro.
On all orders, if you include an email address, CaDD will let you know when the product is shipped. We don't use your email address for any other purpose.
Name:
One of my other weaknesses is trains and model railroading. I grew up in the steam age and was fortunate to see and photograph 10 years of steam in action. In the United States steam reached its zenith in the early 1940s. Each year the Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corporation published the standard reference work for steam locomotive users. It was officially called the 19xx Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, but was usually referred to as the "Cyc." So I combined the somewhat diverse hobbies of steam-powered locomotives and computers and assigned the name "The Cyc" to the TI project.
The Cyc is a labor of love and has a very small, dwindling market. The charge does not cover the cost of reproduction, mailing, and the upkeep of this web site. The balance is paid out of personal funds. When this is explained, nearly all copyright holders are gracious enough to extend permission to CaDD to include their material in The Cyc on a royalty free basis. We thank the many companies and TI'ers that have done so. Unfortunately, there are some who have refused permission. CaDD's policy is to only include material in The Cyc for which express permission has been given. In some cases, material is included for which it is no longer possible to obtain permission, such as defunct companies and publications.
The Cyc documentation files are generated by scanning original material with Caere Omnipage 10 Pro OCR software. The text is edited and, if necessary, corrected in WordPerfect 8 SP 7. Graphics are scanned and inserted using HP Deskscan 2.8 and an HP IIcx scanner. The WordPerfect file is printed to the Adobe Acrobat Distiller 3.0.1 to create a pdf file. This creates a much smaller file than later versions of Acrobat or applications such as WordPerfect 12, without loss of quality. In initial tests the CaDD method produced a file of 212K, while WP 12 processed the same source file to produce a .pdf file of 2050K. At that bloat rate, The Cyc files would no longer fit on a CD.
The collection of files is burned to a CD-R using Nero 6. The CD is created as an ISO9660 image, which can be read under MS Windows 95 and higher, Linux, and any Mac OS which can read CDs. All files are 8.3 format and do not contain spaces or non-ASCII characters.
No. New additions are made to The Cyc on an ongoing basis as time permits. When you order, you get the current version. In fact, it is rare for two copies of The Cyc to be identical.
CaDD has a policy of not annoucing products until they are ready to ship. A corollary to this is that CaDD makes no promise of possible future updates. As a result, CaDD is unable to offer a subscription service to The Cyc.
In practice, most owners of The Cyc send for an update about once a year. The update usually contains sufficient new and corrected material to warrant it. The charge for an upgrade version is $7.50 in the US, and $9.00 overseas. The price includes shipping and handling.
To order an upgrade, you must either return your existing copy, or agree to destroy the previous version.
** You must be a registered PC99 owner to order an upgrade. **
No. The Cyc changes on an almost daily basis as new material is added and updates are made. To see the difference between your copy and what is current, send an email to CaDD containing your registered name and request a current listing. We will do the following for you:
Starting at the root of our development directory we will do:
> dir /o /s > c:\tmp\cycfiles.txt
at the command prompt.
This will generate the file cycfiles.txt, whiich will contain a complete listing of all current delivered files showing their time stamp and size in bytes. This file will be sent to you as an email attachment. It is about 460K bytes. You can compare this listing to one that you generate and decide whether it is time to upgrade.