Historically, what was the thinking behind naming the platform Accordance?

[Lawrence]

Names are often chosen deliberately - whether for the meaning or connotations they evoke, or even just liking the sound of pronouncing the name.

 

How did Accordance's name come about?

 

The history page talks about GRAMCORD, so that's probably where the last syllable came from, but what else motivated the choice of name?

Edited April 28, 2023 by Lawrence

[Pastor Jonathan]

Not sure I have an answer that is accurate, but when I think of the name Accordance, I think of the Scriptures that point us to walk according to God's Word:

 

1. Joshua 1:8

2.Psalm 119:133

3. Psalm 119:1

[cralford]

The original program was developed from a program called Gram Cord I believe. Wallace's Greek Grammar published in 1996 includes the following footnote introducing the application. Note the different way of capitalizing it in the print version. 

 

"⁸  The statistics are initially taken from acCordance, a software program for Macintosh (marketed by the Gramcord Institute, Vancouver, WA) that performs sophisticated searches on a morphologically-tagged Greek NT (Nestle-Aland²⁶), as well as the Hebrew OT (BHS) and LXX (Rahlfs)."

 

Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), xii..

Edited April 28, 2023 by cralford

[cralford]

2 hours ago, Lawrence said:

The history page talks about GRAMCORD, so that's probably where the last syllable came from, but what else motivated the choice of name?

Wups didn't read your post carefully enough. Looking forward to seeing other response

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

I think @cralford explained it well. @David Lang might have something to add since he’s been here for a long time.

[David Lang]

There’s not much about Accordance that was before my time, but the name was already in place when I came on the scene. As some noted, it was originally spelled "acCordance" to emphasize the connection with GRAMCORD, which was itself a contraction of "GRAMmatical conCORDance".

 

Humorously, we learned after version 1 was released that some users were pronouncing it as "a-c-Cordance" (pronouncing the lowercase letters "a" and "c"). That was the reason for the change in spelling to "Accordance" by version 2.

 

From what I've been told, the name was also based on some other considerations:

 

1. The similarity in sound to "concordance" was meant to emphasize the centrality of Accordance's search capabilities.

 

2. Back then, there were dozens of Bible programs. Magazine articles on Bible software would list all those programs in comparison charts listing features, modules, etc. Choosing a name beginning with "A" put us at the top of those lists.

 

3. "Accordance" was indeed meant to call to mind various passages which speak of living "in accordance with" the Scriptures.

 

I hope this helps.

Edited April 29, 2023 by David Lang

[robrecht]

When I was in graduate school (this was during the Hasmonean era), I corrected some of the grammatical tagging in Gramcord in order to get a free copy of the software. Paul Miller was very accommodating in that way. I always assumed these grammatical data were what was taken over by Accordance, but then one day at SBL Helen tried to explain to me exactly what was taken from Gramcord. It was much too technical for me to follow. 

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

@David Lang And it put you ahead of Atari in the phone book. 🙂 

 

(I’m referencing a Steve Jobs quote on how the name “Apple” came into being).

[Teddy24]

I remember an accordance blog about Accordance 1.0 where it was on a 1.44mb floppy disks. I had to google what floppy disks were and what Gramcord was because i remember Daniel Wallace talking about that as well

Edited May 3, 2023 by Teddy24

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

I remember using floppy disks, and I still have a piano that takes them!

[Joe Weaks]

On 4/29/2023 at 11:28 AM, David Lang said:

There’s not much about Accordance that was before my time

Ditto.

Loved those floppy disk installs.

I would echo what David said. It was pretty much another play off of "Concordance"... along with the play off the dozens of places you find "In Accordance".

[Mike Atnip]

11 hours ago, Nathan Parker said:

I remember using floppy disks, and I still have a piano that takes them!

My brother's TRS-80 used cassettes! Now we are talking early 80s, when that monster of a computer cost a whopping $2,000 and had 16mb (I was thinking 16kb, but surely not). With inflation, we are looking at the equivalent of maybe $5,000 today.

[Steven S]

49 minutes ago, Mike Atnip said:

My brother's TRS-80 ... had 16mb (I was thinking 16kb, but surely not).

 

Indeed, depending on the model, the TRS-80 came with anywhere from 4 KB (expandable to 48 KB) up to 64 KB (expandable to 128 KB).

[Michael J. Bolesta]

I remember when a 10 MB hard drive was considered massive, and would never fill up!

[Mike Atnip]

1 hour ago, Steven S said:

 

Indeed, depending on the model, the TRS-80 came with anywhere from 4 KB (expandable to 48 KB) up to 64 KB (expandable to 128 KB).

Well, in my mind for years I thought it was 16k, so you may be right. Now I wonder how it even had enough memory to boot up! 🙂 Yet we even had a very rudimentary flight simulator on that thing. Ah, the good ol days!

[Steven S]

39 minutes ago, Mike Atnip said:

Yet we even had a very rudimentary flight simulator on that thing. Ah, the good ol days!

 

Definitely the good ol' days. I remember my grandfather having me sit down in front of his C64 and type in a BASIC flight simulator from a magazine listing. It took me a whole weekend, but I loved every minute of it.

[robrecht]

My first laptop for graduate school (1989, Hasmonean era) cost about $4k (Compaq SLT/286) because I needed an EGA screen to display Hebrew. It had 640k RAM and a 40-MB hard drive, but when I tried to install all the Greek and Hebrew texts for LBase from Silver Mountain Software, they would not all fit at the same time. I used that behemoth computer until 1996.

[Joe Weaks]

45 minutes ago, robrecht said:

behemoth computer

"portable" computer

[ukfraser]

In the 80s My first computer was a bbc, programs loaded from tape cassettes but it had pascal on a chip. At work we used an original mac linked to our scanning electron microscope and we got an ibm linked to a densitometer for processing control strips and spent double the price upgrading to a 20 mb hard drive and printing out on an hp four colour plotter.
 

But at the end of the 80s when i was auditing, i had a 3 ¼ disc i took round with me which had wordstar on it which was a fully functioning word processor so i could write my report and print it on a dot matrix printer and leave it at the lab, job done.

 

Then progressed to ami pro and pagemaker on early windows machines and a tosh lap top with red screen running dr dos. 
 

happy days.

 

does anyone else miss the flying toaster screen saver? 

Edited May 3, 2023 by ukfraser

[Lawrence]

4 hours ago, Joe Weaks said:

"portable" computer

 

I recall the term "luggable" computer.

[Lawrence]

3 hours ago, ukfraser said:

In the 80s My first computer was a bbc, programs loaded from tape cassettes but it had pascal on a chip. At work we used an original mac linked to our scanning electron microscope and we got an ibm linked to a densitometer for processing control strips and spent double the price upgrading to a 20 mb hard drive and printing out on an hp four colour plotter.
 

But at the end of the 80s when i was auditing, i had a 3 ¼ disc i took round with me which had wordstar on it which was a fully functioning word processor so i could write my report and print it on a dot matrix printer and leave it at the lab, job done.

 

Then progressed to ami pro and pagemaker on early windows machines and a tosh lap top with red screen running dr dos. 
 

happy days.

 

does anyone else miss the flying toaster screen saver? 

 

The floppies I'm familiar with were either 5.25" (actually floppy, depending on the quality of the plastic) or 3.5" (rigid plastic).

There were purpose-made boxes to store them, though the boxes the floppies were sold in were themselves very durable.

 

5.25" floppies held something like 360kB. They came with a notch cut onto one side to let the hardware know it was writable. To write-protect the disk, you'd get some sticky tape to cover the hole. And if you flipped the floppy around and cut a matching hole on the other side, you could write to the back of the floppy and get an additional 360kB!

 

Programs ("apps" in today's lingo) were tiny in those days. Even in the late '80s, the whole Microsoft Excel program took up just a few 1.44MB 3.5" disks. I wouldn't be surprised if the splash screen alone uses more space than that now.

 

Yeah, those were the days.

 

[Paul Meiklejohn]

9 hours ago, ukfraser said:

Then progressed to ami pro and pagemake

Ami Pro!!  it came with a massive printed manual (full size book) and I read it from cover.  

[Michael J. Bolesta]

16 hours ago, ukfraser said:

does anyone else miss the flying toaster screen saver? 

 

Flying toaster! Now I had not thought of them in a long, long time!

[Brian K. Mitchell]

 

On 4/29/2023 at 12:19 AM, Lawrence said:

How did Accordance's name come about?

I was always under the impression that the name acCordance/accordance was short for Apple ConCordance. 

Edited May 5, 2023 by Brian K. Mitchell