Platform Independent Perseus 2 Unveiled

History and Background
When planning for Perseus first began in 1985, the project board's platform of choice was the Apple Macintosh®. This decision was dictated by the Macintosh's graphics capability, ease of use, and the critical role the Mac has long played in education. Early on, however, project members decided to structure the contents of Perseus, the core data, in a manner that permitted expansion beyond the Macintosh platform. Although both Perseus 1.0 and Perseus 2.0 were based on Apple's HyperCard® software, the Perseus data was never exclusive to HyperCard or to the Mac. This foresight has enabled project staff to bring large portions of the material in the Perseus 2.0 CDs to the WWW. Despite the volume of data, the fundamental transition from HyperCard Perseus to WWW Perseus took less than four weeks.
Current Software
The first demonstration version of the new software appeared on the Perseus WWW site in August, 1996. In late September, 1997, Perseus received funding from the Annenberg/CPB Project to "port" Perseus 2.0 for Macintosh to the Windowsreg. operating system. Head project programmer David Smith decided to base this new cross-platform version of Perseus on the Tcl/Tk package by John Ousterhout from Scriptics Corporation. The first public beta release of Platform Independent Perseus 2 ("PIP") took place on September 8, 1998. To date, there have been over 700 downloads of the beta software. Pending the results of beta testing, Perseus will deliver the software to publisher Yale University Press in early January, 1999.
Advantages of "PIP"
The primary advantage of Platform Independent Perseus 2 is that Windows® 95, Windows® 98, and Windows NT® users will be able to run Perseus 2.0. The software also features some improvements previous Mac users of Perseus 2.0 will appreciate. It is, for instance, notably faster on the Mac platform than the HyperCard-based versions of Perseus. There are also some minor changes to the Perseus design which have improved the overall look and feel of the software. Programmer David Smith notes that, "PIP runs faster than HyperCard Perseus, so the thumbnail browser and the atlas are much more useful. Running off a network can be even faster than CD-ROM, and system administrators will appreciate the built-in network capabilities." William Merrill, author of the Perseus 2.0 User's Guide, is preparing new and extensive documentation for Platform Independent Perseus 2, which is regularly updated on-line. The most up-to-date version of the document may be found in the Help section of the on-line Perseus Digital Library.
Contents of "PIP"
The content of Platform Independent Perseus 2 is identical to Perseus 2.0 for Macintosh. "PIP" will not reflect recent additions to the on-line Perseus Digital Library. For instance, the Latin texts and tools, the enhanced sculpture catalog, the full Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek Lexicon, and the Greek and Latin grammars are all prominent parts of the Perseus Digital Library which were added after the release of Perseus 2.0 for Macintosh, and are therefore not on PIP. A chart for comparison is below.

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document placed on-line 12/29/98, LMC