Xargs is perfect for a parallel task like this.

I do have a few options as to real hardware vs emulation but to be honest have more than enough projects and was struggling to find motivation – that said looking at what you were doing made a lot more sense long term.

We have the wooden box and manuals and goodies. Such a difference to read the manual and see that if you were somehow able to download the “massive 100mb of auxiliary files” it would have better performance. Having the entire collection on a USB thumb would have been mind blowing then.

I still think that it would have been a better (and easier) call to have used some form of html – you get the indexing, searching and it would still work today.

Do post on whatever you end up with please.

You can find them per decade on archive.org. The text is so low quality the OCR struggled. There is a DVD version with much better images, which I may tackle at a later time. I just wanted to do these for the sake of it.

I ran it under Macintosh emulation originally, but once I saw the pattern on how they were named, it was a mission to OCR & PDF them all.

Did you get the decorative wooden box? It’s surprisingly nice. It’s funny it’s 18GB of poorly scanned material, but in 1997 it’d have been such a massive deal.

If you succeed with generating an OCRed, possibly .pdf that would be very interesting. Not sure why they didnt just use .html if they wanted an easy way to publish the information.

I see you have to set the date back to 2010 to get it to install because of some really poor certificate choices.

I ran the OCR against it, and it’s significantly more scannable than the CD-ROM jpeg’s.

Oh well I have a fancy box now.

These have “cng” files, but “The cng files are all jpegs, XOR’d bitwise with 239.”

The same snipped looks like https://imgur.com/5LC0KrS (full page https://imgur.com/nkNl907).