How much time and effort may have been put in?

[rikforto]

The reasons are more scrutable, but there are some genuinely absurd feats of repetition in the early modern period. Creating log tables by hand and some of the work that went into astronomical tables. My recollection of the details is hazy, but calculating pi by hand before Newton was attempted by many people and required a tremendous amount of time to push to greater precision, yet people did it. Reflecting a personal interest, these are all math related, and slightly later than the VMS, but it goes to show how willing people are to do a repetitive task for fairly abstract ends. I'm pretty dour on the idea that the VMS was algorithmically created, not because people were unwilling to put the time and effort into algorithms, but because there are easier ways to get a meaningless text that has the VMS's features