Software With Infinite Patience

March 16, 2022 5:44 PM

Who was Thomas Buchler, the late creator of beloved Torah program TropeTrainer? And can anything be done to revive his life’s work? S.I. Rosenbaum recounts the surprisingly complex story for Input.
posted by zamboni (15 comments total)

A friend - coincidentally Jewish - once said to me:

"Me" and "my hard drive" also top most people's list of Things Whose Inevitable Death I Refuse To Take Seriously.

In this case Buchler predeceased his hard drive, but with the same result for his software.
posted by clawsoon at 6:26 PM on March 16, 2022 [7 favorites]

What a beautiful piece. I just got home from Purim services where I read from the Megillah (book of Esther) for the first time. It uses a different set of trope patterns (same symbols, different melodies; there are also special melodies for other holidays, too.) I learned it via a sound file emailed to me by my Rabbi; back in middle and high school I learned the trope for my bat mitzvah and other things via a cassette tape that my tutor recorded for me.

What a gift to be able to shift voices and trope. I'm lucky my singing range is the same as my Rabbi's; I've had issues in the past where they're too high or too low for me and I struggle to transpose. And the archival aspect of this really can't be overstated. The trope patterns of your community are really, really special. I hope something can be cobbled together in the future to save some of this work somehow.
posted by damayanti at 6:42 PM on March 16, 2022 [8 favorites]

Huh. I sorta wonder if virtualization would help. In order to get some multiplatform GUI software running recently on a Mac, I ran the Linux version in Docker.
posted by Pronoiac at 7:59 PM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thank you for sharing this beautiful, tragic story. I love stories about how people extend themselves into the things that surround them. Software imbued with memory and history.
posted by Zumbador at 8:40 PM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Huh. I sorta wonder if virtualization would help.

Painstakingly copying and reverse-engineering a piece of black box software across VMs for the next four thousand years does seem like the thematically Jewish solution.
posted by atoxyl at 10:56 PM on March 16, 2022 [46 favorites]

Despite several popular forks with more permissive licensing, as it were.
posted by atoxyl at 11:01 PM on March 16, 2022 [12 favorites]

This is a beautiful story. After reading it this morning I've found myself thinking about Buchler's HIV-positive surviving partner, Zakai Ben-Chaim, and their baby. The English phrase "widows and orphans" can have a jokey, oldy-timey feel to it, or it reminds you of battling with Microsoft Word. But if you're chanting the Torah (or reading the Pentateuch, in my case) in a lot of places you're repeating God's commandment to care and provide for the widow[er] and the orphan, exactly the people that Buchler left behind. My outsider sense is that mutual assistance in this spirit is a strong part of Orthodox Jewish culture, but I don't really know. Certainly it's a wonderfully literal opportunity for the rabbis and congregants who were blessed by Buchler's work to honor him and the tradition that he helped them to pass down.
posted by sy at 12:50 AM on March 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Fantastic piece, thank you for sharing this.
posted by dr_dank at 6:16 AM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I saw this via Jason Scott's "please stop asking me to host this" tweet yesterday.

The fact that TropeTrainer uses a highly modified version of DECTalk to sing is a marvel. But I've got no time for the new "TropeTrainer(TM)" guy at all, who seems to have a different product riding on the reputation of Buchler's software.
posted by scruss at 8:24 AM on March 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

Wow this is such a cool article full of surprising twists (often into some amazingly queer corner of the universe).
posted by latkes at 8:26 AM on March 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

I saw this via Jason Scott's "please stop asking me to host this" tweet yesterday.

As @sirosenbaum expertly and effectively demonstrates through this article, the issues are not technical. We long ago figured out how to do this sort of thing. A virtualization container and a properly-set-up environment to run within it would make short work of this in a month.

The problems here are that Buchler fell for the same problem a lot of technical people I deal with do, which are the issues of their works beyond their deaths. It's hard enough to keep stuff running, why try to deal with it beyond the grave? It's not a flaw, it's just a choice.

Everything about this story tells me it's a legal minefield and I wish great luck to whoever takes on the mitzvah of bringing this software back into the realm of the living. But I don't think that's going to be me.

posted by zamboni at 8:34 AM on March 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm more than 40 years past my bar mitzvah, and just about 40 years from any expression of or interest in Judaism, but after reading that article, listening to the audio recording in the last link gave me shivers.

Thanks for posting this amazing story.
posted by Gorgik at 8:47 AM on March 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

What an incredible story and what a loss - both the author and the software.

I agree that the issues here seem mostly legal. Technically, it would be possible to set up a Citrix server running an older version of Windows and let people log into it from modern systems. Virtualization could keep the software running indefinitely.

The good news is that the programming culture has shifted a lot since TropeTrainer was written. Most hobbyist or other small time programmers these days share their source code on Github under a permissive license. =
posted by dgr8bob at 10:20 AM on March 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

If someone still has an installation disk for Trope Trainer, it might run under Wine.
posted by duoshao at 1:04 PM on March 18, 2022

An older version of TropeTrainer is on Archive.org. This person on Twitter got it running.
posted by waxpancake at 4:52 PM on March 18, 2022 [2 favorites]