In my recent article on the price and performance of some commercial OCR (optical character recognition) models, I predicted Google’s Gemini 3.8 would cost $35.30 ± $23.70 to convert 1,000 pages containing computer printouts to text. Now, after scanning 5,877 pages, I can adjust this prediction to $34.02 ± $30.82, demonstrating the sample was representative. Details below.
Community Memory was a digital bulletin board “for the unmediated sharing of information for use by the general public” (Farrington 1987) deployed in three generations around Berkeley, California from 1974 to 1991. With terminals placed in public places, members of the public could read and write messages to each other, entertain themselves, find information, and conduct business. In 1987, a staff member at the Community Memory Project created a report on users' search patterns, which survived to be archived at the Computer History Museum. This dataset is a rare glimpse into how a non-computer enthusiast, pre-Internet general population used a proto-social network. By analyzing the dataset using NLP techniques, we find the top three search clusters, each about a fifth of the total, are 1) buying and selling products (“for sale”), 2) debate and general discussion, and 3) searching for posts by prominent personalities. Unexpectedly, erotic-related queries are the fourth most popular with 9% of the total.
The Community Memory corpus consists of approximately 5,500 scanned printouts of bulletin board-style posts made by Berkeley residents in the 1980s. Since residents posted messages through publicly accessible terminals, the postings reflect a potentially distinct and broader population than other computer-facilitated networks of the time (e.g. Usenet, The WELL). In advance of a potential project to translate the scans into an indexed, machine-readable form, we evaluate the optical character recognition (OCR) performance and economy of five models (Document AI, Gemini 3.7 and 3.8, Mistral OCR, and Qwen3) on a sample of the corpus. We find that current generation general purpose LLMs perform better than specialized OCR engines and while Qwen3 and Gemini 3.7 have similar price/performance ratios, Gemini 3.8 is surprisingly a degradation to Gemini 3.7. We conclude that research tasks using the OCR output will need to be robust to at least four character errors per line or one word error per line.
The Balance is a cooperative card game published by New Venture Games. The objective of the game is to set the top card on eight piles to the same value before the players run out of cards. Players do not know the contents of the other player’s hands and are restricted from communicating on the goal, so part of the challenge of the game is intuiting a shared goal.