Bible Research Systems' THE WORD Processor

For Those Who Seek.

From the November 1983 issue of A+ magazine

When new forms of media are invented, man quickly converts his most important documents to the latest format. Religious documents are usually among the first, especially the Bible. This is what Kent Ochel and Bert Brown did for the Apple ][.

In the Beginning was the Database

Kent Ochel started his programming career at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Institute, working on databases in the 1960s. After a couple of years, he moved to System 2000 Corporation and then to MRI Systems. In 1978, MRI was purchased by Intel. He soon became president of the Intel systems division. He left Intel in 1980.

Bert Brown worked for NASA during the Apollo years designing databases. He joined MRI at the same time that Ochel did. After the merger, he became a product manager at Intel working on System 2000 databases. He left the company in the early 1980s.

For several years, Ochel and Brown tossed around the idea of putting the Bible on a disk. Brown told The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “Our personal motivation is wanting to help people read The Word more.” He told a reporter from United Press, “To use people's time efficiently in home Bible study is just what a computer is made for.”

They spent time considering how to do it and what translation to include. They settled on the King James version because it was widely used and was not copyrighted.

From Tape to Bytes

They originally thought about typing out the Bible, but they quickly realized that it was a big project. Instead, they found someone who had the Bible on computer tape for typesetting. The tape was designed to work with the IBM System/370, so the two had to write a program that “would allow communication between the IBM 3805 controller and the Apple serial interface board.”

Even using the computer tape took time:

“The transfer rate was of some concern since there are approximately 4.5 million characters (36 million bits) of text in the Bible. If the transfer rate were only 300 baud, the move from IBM to Apple would require thirty-three hours. Ochel and Brown settled for a transfer rate of 2400 baud. The raw transfer filled forty-two standard five-and-a-quarter-inch disks.”

While that was transferring, Ochel worked on software to handle the data.

“Ochel came upon a word frequency analysis study done for the Bible, and that helped immensely. It's nice to know, for instance, that the word the appears 63,871 times. There are some 789,000 word occurrences in the Bible, comprised of nearly 14,000 unique words. Twenty percent of all the words begin with the letter t.

Eight-bit configurations were assigned to the most frequently occurring words. Analyses of letter sequence occurrences such as ie, ea, ing, and many more were made and eight-bit configurations were assigned to the sequences with the highest probability of occurrence.”

The Product

Based on conversations with other programmers and non-geeks, Ochel and Brown developed THE WORD Processor. The backend was written in assembly, and the BASIC was used to write the menu-driven user interface. Since the creators were database experts, the program had many features to study the contents of the Bible:

“You can create indexes of any configuration you choose, offering the opportunity to improve on existing concordances. The indexes can be stored on disk and combined using boolean and/or logic. You can search for and highlight word or phrase occurrences. Scrolling through the teoct can be done several different ways, one verse at a time or much faster if you desire. A print program is included for printing hard copy of any selected Bible text.

…

The display functions of the program are fairly complete, offering a range of options that allow you to move through the text at will. Once you are in a book, you can reference a specific verse, hit return, and the program takes you right there. Likewise, the scan feature is quite handy. You can look for specific words or scan for a specific suffix or prefix. You can also scan for words via smaller words incorporated in them, like mankind.

The text manipulation programs are all simple to use and offer no great barrier to understanding the program at hand. Creating, modifying, and combining indexes is equally as easy. Printing out hard copy of Bible text or lists of indexes is no more difficult than it is with the average word processor print program.”

After receiving feedback, Ochel and Brown started selling their program in early 1982. They also started working on improvements, including the addition of “Strong's Reference Guide — a handy volume that takes every word in the Bible and relates it back to the original Greek…Nave's Topical Index — a volume that directs you to specific topics and where they're found in the Bible”. They also wanted to license other translations of the Bible. The WORD Processor cost $150 and consisted of 8 floppy disks. It was available for “Apple II-plus, Apple III, IBM-PC and Radio Shack TRS80-III computers“.

Their customers came from a wide range of backgrounds. “Religious computer owners are not the only ones who want a computer's help in studying the Bible. A significant number of buyers have “an academic interest” in the Bible as a work of history or literature, according to Brown. The program also is being purchased by schools and public libraries.” “A survey found users 'very spread out,' Brown said. 'We have a high geographical concentration in California and Florida -- in California because of the high percentage of computer-type people there and Florida because of the number of retired people who have a lot of time to study the Bible.'“

One of their customers gave the product a glowing review:

When Beryl Thompson studies the Bible, she does not pick up a well-worn leather book. Instead, she switches on an Apple computer.

The 70-year-old Bible teacher is one of several hundred people now studying the Scriptures using a computer program developed by Bible Research Systems, a small Austin, Texas, firm. The company's program, dubbed “The Word Processor,” is the first to provide the entire Bible in a form that can be used on a home computer.

“I am finding it very useful,” teacher Thompson says. “It is much simpler to use” than traditional Bible study methods.

Try it for Yourself

If you are curious about this application, you can try it yourself. Archive.org has a copy of The WORD Processor 4.3 for DOS.

Have you ever used any Bible Research Systems products? Do you know anything about its history? Tell us about it in the comments below.