As previously noted in a now-deleted thread elsewhere, Stefan Schneider was kind enough to respond to a request for a community license for the LatinByrdIII RTF-to-HTML converter. LatinByrd rather incredibly still has a website (http://members.chello.at/stefan-schneider/LatinByrdProductInfo.html), and was a staple for a short window in the late 90s and early 2000s for making NeXT documentation web accessible. (I still plan on making a spiffy new NeXTanswers site using it.)
Here are some of the emails we exchanged at the time:
QuoteHi Stefan,
I'm working on a project to restore an online, searchable copy of NeXTanswers based on amalgamated datasets from 1997-1999. This work would be greatly expedited if I could use LatinByrd for the heavy lifting, as I want to make the new site as authentic as possible.
Since it has been a long time since the machines running LatinByrd were last commercially important, would you be willing to consider releasing a free license to the nextcomputers.org community? LatinByrd is a small but important part of the history of the platform, and releasing a license like this would allow us to preserve it for future generations.
If not, I would be eager to obtain one of the limited-time trial licenses mentioned on the LatinByrd site, if it is still possible to generate them.
Thank you,
Samantha
His reply:
QuoteHi Samantha,
I have found an unsold academic license key which should fit your requirements:
[...]
I'm not sure whether my OCR scanned the key correctly, it might instead read like this:
[...]
(If you encounter any problems, please let me know.)
best regards,
Stefan
That particular key ended up not working, so we went back and forth a few times before he found me one that was valid:
QuoteHi Samantha,
my apologies for the inconvenience! It might be that this key was too old. Here is the latest key I could find:
Aek@-SFP^-yBpU-dZ6M-JpYQ-]upc
Please try this one and tell me whether it works.
best regards
Stefan
(I did reply to him to confirm that it worked and give him my thanks. I also asked him if he had any parts of his old website from noir.com/sss archived, but he never got back to me.)
So, there you have it: our key is
Aek@-SFP^-yBpU-dZ6M-JpYQ-]upc PmAg7ZMKCV2eFLZl.png
Relatedly, my master spreadsheet for NeXT software preservation, which includes this key and a few others, can be found here (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bjpLWLxp6j891Nu8u6NzvwnpN5_NuUAJei283JVrW7U/edit). I haven't worked on it at all in recent months (very busy with RL stuff still) but what's there should be accurate and of value nonetheless.
Thanks had to use web.archive.org to download it with the English Readme.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051219201607/http://www.noir.net/sss/LatinByrd.IIIv7.NIHS.b.tar.gz (https://web.archive.org/web/20051219201607/http://www.noir.net/sss/LatinByrd.IIIv7.NIHS.b.tar.gz)
https://web.archive.org/web/20051219185943/http://www.noir.net/sss/LatinByrd.IIIv7.README (https://web.archive.org/web/20051219185943/http://www.noir.net/sss/LatinByrd.IIIv7.README)
https://web.archive.org/web/20061110063513/http://www.noir.net/sss/LatinByrd.IIIv7.LISEZMOI (https://web.archive.org/web/20061110063513/http://www.noir.net/sss/LatinByrd.IIIv7.LISEZMOI)
https://web.archive.org/web/20070912115008/http://www.noir.net/sss/LatinByrd.IIIv7.LIESMICH (https://web.archive.org/web/20070912115008/http://www.noir.net/sss/LatinByrd.IIIv7.LIESMICH)