Word: bettmann
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DIED. OTTO BETTMANN, 94, excavator extraordinaire of the photographic past who obsessively amassed some 5 million images in the archive that bore his name; in Boca Raton, Fla. A curator of rare books, Bettmann fled to New York from Nazi Germany, carrying with him two steamer trunks filled with thousands of rolls of exposed 35-mm film, the seeds of his fabled collection. The Bettmann Archive has belonged to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates since...
...software in Windows 95. He dropped his resistance to a number of de facto Internet standards, including Sun Microsystem's Java. Meanwhile, he began securing high-profile content to put on his own network, luring commentator Michael Kinsley from cnn to start an online political magazine and purchasing the Bettmann Archives, one of the world's greatest collections of historical photographs. Last week he appeared in an electronic press conference to announce that he is teaming with NBC to create a 24-hour news service that will compete with CNN, both on cable TV and online...
...client needed an illustration of Freud (once the most popular request) or Jesus (less so) or perhaps Washington's wooden dentures, Bettmann ferreted it out of his filing cabinets. Only rarely did he disappoint, as when a pasta manufacturer wanted a drawing of Jefferson eating spaghetti. (The Archives for years offered a reward of $1,000 for an illustration of the Earl of Sandwich eating a sandwich...
...Bettmann sold his business to a small publishing firm and retired to Florida. For him, the sale was an occasion of satisfaction without sentiment."I hate nostalgia," he said, "but I've made a hell of a living from it." So have his successors, who have continued to make the Bettmann credit line ubiquitous in print. Now a few taps on the computer keyboard will bring it to the screen. That prospect pleases the 92-year-old Bettmann, who pronounced himself delighted "to have seen my original acorn nourished and cultivated into a formidable digitized...
Software mogul Bill Gates' privately held Corbis Corp. purchased the Bettmann Archive and its 16 million photographs and illustrations for an undisclosed sum in the millions of dollars. Corbis has already bought nonexclusive electronic rights to thousands of images from several world-famous museums for digital conversion...