Hello Bsradams,
My Name is Darren Perkins, I have been working with Bruce Wydner for several years and I decided to tell this story through Wikipedia.
It is interesting that you wish to show the entire quote from the Wall Street Journal, where I had chosen to include only portions.
I asked Bruce Wydner to comment on your changes, this is what he said in a nutshell, “The WSJ article was not authorized by me (the inventor) Bruce Wydner or Weidner Communications. It was a stunt started by the Eyring Research Institute that ended up having some bias in it.”
I personally have seen the printouts from the demonstrations in 1978 and they are quite crude as the article suggests but what the WSJ article does not show is the revolutionary language parsing that this simple engine was producing. The attendees at the National Translation Association were quite impressed, so much so that the Weidners walked away with $250,000 in orders from that demonstration. And the reports from others like Thomas Bauman suggest that they saw something much more than just an automated dictionary and thesaurus.
Also the WSJ article was written before the Weidner Multi-lingual Word Processor had ever been sold to any customer. At the time of writing the article in the WSJ the software was a demonstration only. For you to try to suggest (by including the entire article’s quote) that the software in its infancy was less than the accolades written later by so many professionals, is to demean the entire invention.
Your attempt to furnish an unbiased opinion on this article is in poor taste, and is much uninformed. I would be willing to help you see the whole picture as I have it available, and please feel free to ask myself or Bruce Wydner any questions, or even better yet give him a phone call, he is very nice and polite and he doesn’t mind talking, if you would like, just tell him that I told you to call him, we are the best of friends.
His phone number is 1(801)290-2199 he is there most of the time, I would suggest between 9:00 am to 10:00 pm Utah, Mountain Time, don’t leave him a message as he has been known to not check his answering machine for a very long time, just call back later if you don’t connect with him.
I know you will be best served by talking to him, I suggest you plan for a long call and take good notes, you will be amazed. If you need supporting documents I have copies of everything you may need, let me know.
Respectfully, Darren Perkins dbp653@yahoo.com