It was a slow process, but all the handwritten or typewritten translation projects of New Testaments and/or complete Bibles had to be rekeyed into computers.

The organization I worked with had heeded the advice of a “computer savvy” pastor in New York and bought Texas Instrument computers for the office. I also was told to use them for the translation projects. It is a long story but the software we needed to use was developed for the IBM MS-DOS operating system, and the MS-DOS operating system in the Texas Instruments computers were not IBM compatible. Eventually, we bought and installed special IBM compatible boards that allowed us to work with the proprietary software we needed to use. However, the users complained because the display was much smaller than the regular TI display.

Introducing computers to the natives working on the translation teams turned out to be much easier than convincing the translation consultants, all with doctoral degrees.

At the beginning of the adventure of adopting computers for the translation of the Bible to native languages, United Bible Societies had a Translation Conference in Zimbabwe. All of us, the three brand new “computer people”, ( for Americas, Asia and Africa) were invited and also some representatives of Wycliffe Bible Translators.

When finally we were able to show Toshiba and Sharp portables and Software Manuals displayed on a table outside the Conference room, some Translation Consultants, (scholars with many degrees in Theology, Linguistics, Hebrew Grammar, Semitic Languages and many other impressive skills) were skeptically interested, and approached the table, many with an air of superiority.

The questions were many. “How much did a portable computer cost, how heavy it is, how long does the battery last, how long does it take to learn it?” But the best of all questions came from one of the consultants. He had carefully checked the software manuals for MS DOS for WordPerfect word processor, for the checking programs from Wycliffe, Translation Manuals, and some Bibles in English that had already been converted to digital form.

One of us made the argument that travelling with a portable computer will eliminate the need to travel with the weight of so many versions of the Bible and manuals. So this consultant asked. “But how much do they weigh after you insert in them all these heavy manuals?” Politely, we had to explain that software added no extra weight. They only take space in the computer disk. However, in the back of my mind I was thinking “but you will carry the laptop and still carry the manuals until you trust the computer”.