Future Improvements
The development of the ESSAYS System began in 1973, during the author's first sabbatical leave from college teaching. At that time the initial 253 essays were written.
The author began writing the computer programs of the ESSAYS System in about 1982. They evolved into a mature system of computer programs by 1993, when 150 copies of the ESSAYS System were shared with participants in the international and trans-disciplinary conference "Einstein Meets Magrite" at New University, Brussels, Belgium. The conference participants consisted of approximately 600 scientists and humanists from 46 countries. The author was one of about three hundred presenters at the conference.
Since 1993, the focus has been on editing all the paper-bound essays, and upon preparing the overall system for distribution over the INTERNET.
As of the January of 2001, there are approximately 6,800 essays available for download. The remaining text editing job is to eliminate some inappropriate extended-strings-of-blanks in text files.
Long-term an effort will be made to improve the tools for finding essays which deal with topics of interest to readers. It is hoped to develop a way to help the reader quickly find essays which are "most-like" the one being viewed; and to find essays which are "most-different-from" the one being viewed. A text compactor (by a factor of about 7) was created during a sabbatical and it will be added to The ESSAYS System in due course to speed down-load times and minimize hard-drive storage demands substantially. It is anticipated that the download times will be cut nearly in half and hard-drive storage demands will be reduced by about a factor of 8 compared to the present ESSAYS System.
There may still be some "bugs" in the computer program system, and continual
progress will be made to eliminate any remaining "bugs" as they become
evident. The author will welcome notification of bugs by users. Look for
the
The pace of all this work will depend in part on the extent to which SHAREWARE users of the ESSAYS System offer support, through suggestions and the registration of their use of the system. Supportive feed-back, suggestions and constructive criticisms will be most welcome. Progress in developing the ESSAYS System will be reflected on the UPDATES PAGE.
Visits to this Web Page to date.