Andrew Scherpbier (andrews@contigo.com)
Fri, 18 Jun 1999 09:18:30 -0700
Elizabeth Smigielski wrote:
>
> Dear Sir or Madam,
>
> I'm writing a report on the general function and design of ht://Dig, as it is used here at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. I am a bit confused as to the difference between ht://Dig (the formal name) and htdig. From what I gather, ht://Dig the general name for the system, whereas htdig is the name for the component that retrieves documents and functions as the search robot, and works in conjunction with htmerge, htfuzzy, etc to create the overall product, ht://Dig. Is this accurate? If not, please clarify this.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Mrs. E. Smigielski
Yes, this is correct.
Perhaps a little history would be good here...
When I started developing a search engine, way back in '93 (I don't
remember exactly when I started), I called it 'htdig'. The first
version was written entirely in Perl while the second version was in
Perl and C.
When I started development on version 3 I asked one of the graphic
artists (Keith Parks) at San Diego State University to design a logo for
the software. He came up with the logo as it stands now. He was the
one that actually put the '://' in the name because he throught it was
more appropriate. I liked it and decided to rename the package to
'ht://Dig' to go with the logo!
Since '/' is a special character under Unix, I couldn't rename the
indexer, so it remained 'htdig'.
I hope this helps!
-- Andrew Scherpbier <andrews@contigo.com> Contigo Software <http://www.contigo.com/>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Fri Jun 18 1999 - 08:33:53 PDT