Re: A radical idea: a new XyWrite

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Let me preface this by acknowledging that I don't know
enough to have an accurate judgment of such things, but let me give a
counterargument in the hope that something can be done.


1. The task I'm suggesting is orders of magnitude simpler than producing
a WYSIWIG program (even Eudora is WYSIWYG), let alone a
photo-editor.


2. It wouldn't be a commercial product and wouldn't have to have the
quality of XyWrite. Why not? Because in event of a glitch, we have
XyWrite (vDOSPlus) right there to carry on with. It doesn't require
abandoning XyWrite, just having another tool. I would expect a slow
migration to a progressively higher percentage of time spent with the new
tool.


3. I wasn't thinking of porting but of cloning. (In the old days, there
was something called cross-compiling, and I wonder if that exists and is
relevant.)


4. As to who would pay, I would, for one, and I think several of us would
contribute.


Again, I'm not saying that these counterarguments carry the day. Just
that we should look further.


--Harry


I'm afraid I have to agree with
Bill.  Just look at how long NotaBene struggled to advance into the
64-bit world, even with full rights to the XyWrite code and the services
of Dave Erickson.   Or those of you who are photographers know
how many *years* it has taken GIMP (open sources alternative to
Photoshop) to move up from 8-bit color editing to 16-bit. Even now the
stable release is only 8-bit.   So what looks to us amateurs
like a pretty simple porting of code turns out to be mega-person-hours of
work.  (I *still* think, "How can it be that complex? Who
designed these programming languages, anyway?" But apparently it
*is* that complex, even for minds much quicker and brighter than mine.
Sigh.)


Myron


On Apr 9, 2018, at 7:23 PM, Bill Troop
mailto:billtroop@xxxxxxxx
wrote:


Yes, you are. For one thing it's not just writing the program, it's
getting thousands or millions of aggregate hours of testing. XyWrite is
high quality code. The cheap programmers you're thinking of wouldn't know
where to begin. If you look at the history of Mac and Win apps and the
often mixedly successful attempts to bring them to another platform or
more pertinently if you look at the efforts to rewrite Eudora from
scratch, you might conclude that this is not the right question to ask.
It might be possible for Dave to extend XyWrite in some desirable way,
but who would pay?


On Mon, 9 Apr 2018 at 18:50, Harry Binswanger
mailto:hb@xxxxxxxx wrote:



I'm trying to go further in adapting XyWrite for the 64-bit world.
I


emailed Steve Siebert about hiring the services of Dave Erickson to
break


the 64k limit on program memory (and other memory). So far, no
response.



But now some new and radical thoughts are piercing my brain:



1. If extending the memory is a simple matter of swapping pages in
and out


of the available addressed space, do we need Dave Erickson, or could
we


hire a cheap Filipino programmer to do that? (I've hired one at $7 an
hour


to do _javascript_.)



2. The next thought I had was even further out. And rather heretical.
How


much would it cost to hire a programmer to write a whole new program,
from


the ground up, to match exactly the functionality of XyWrite? I mean
such


that it would be 100% compatible, U2 and all. But 64-bit, fast, and
with


vDOS plus kind of configurability.



I would, myself, want it written in Python. And there are a lot of
cheap,


foreign Python programmers out there.



I wonder how long it took Dave to write it? After all, he was doing a
knock


off of Atex, so maybe we can fund a knock of XyWrite.



Am I dreaming?