taVista Translation--, which could translate webpages (up to three
pages at the same time) from English into French, German, Italian,
Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa. The software was developed by
SYSTRAN (an acronym for System Translation), a company specializing in
machine translation software. SYSTRAN's headquarters are located in
Soisy-sous-Montmorency, near Paris, France. Sales, marketing, and
research and development are based in its subsidiary in La Jolla,
California. This initiative was followed by other translation software
developed by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie, and
Softissimo, with free and/or paid versions on the web.

December 1997 > The Logos Dictionary

Logos is a global translation company founded in 1979 by Rodrigo
Vergara, with headquarters in Modena, Italy. In December 1997, the
company made a bold move, and decided to put on the web the linguistic
tools used by its translators, for the internet community to freely use
them as well. The linguistic tools were the Logos Dictionary, a
multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words (in fall 1998); the Logos
Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 328 billion words extracted
from translated novels, technical manuals and other texts; the Logos
Linguistic Resources, a database of 553 glossaries; and the Logos
Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in 17 languages. In 2007,
the Logos Library (formerly Wordtheque) had 710 billion words,
Linguistic Resources included 1,215 glossaries, and the Universal
Conjugator (formerly Conjugation of Verbs) included verbs in 36
languages.

1998 > The first volume of the Encyclopedie (1751) online

A common project of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique--National Scientific Research Center) in France and the
University of Chicago in Illinois (USA), the ARTFL Project (ARTFL:
American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language)
made available on the web in 1998 the database of the first volume of
the Encyclopedie, as an experimental project. This online experiment
was a first step towards a full online version of the first edition
(1751-1772) of the Encyclopedie from Diderot and d'Alembert, with
72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors (including
Voltaire, Rousseau, Marmontel, d'Holbach, Turgot, etc.), its 17 volumes
of text (with 20,736,912 words and 18,000 pages) and its 11 volumes of
plates. Designed to collect and disseminate the entire kno