LatinByrdIII community license

[Rhetorica]

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, 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:

Hi 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:

Hi 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:

Hi 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

Relatedly, my master spreadsheet for NeXT software preservation, which includes this key and a few others, can be found here. 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.