Re: Running XY 3 in DOS 6.22 in this daqy and age...

["George Scithers" owlswickpress@xxxxxxxx]

Now back up that USB key on a couple-three CDs!

AND also on a couple spare keys!!

G H Scithers
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marc" 
To: 
Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2006 7:29 PM
Subject: Running XY 3 in DOS 6.22 in this daqy and age...

Hello
This is not related to any particular discussion thread, but it
is a
situation that happened to me recently, and how I overcame the
problems.
I have a contract to extract legal information for a company
that prints
(and glues in to the legislature volumes) annotations.
They use XY III and, due to a lack of in-house expertise, they
are not
looking at upgrading to any other version.
When running my XPL programs on an XP based PC, I would
sometimes get
strange results, pages cut-off half way, the programs just not
processing
all files in the directory, etc. To overcome this I kept an old
IBM 486
which I ran DOS 6.22. All was good with the world.
Then the hard drive crashed. I had a company attempt to extract
the programs
off it, to no avail.
I managed to find old versions of the programs (without
modifications added
later) and eventually got them up to date.
The HDD crash got me thinking, and I ended up buying a USB
memory key
(256Mb), formatted it as FAT16, Sys'd it and loaded up DOS
6.22, XY, Norton
Utilities 4.5 etc.
Now I can run XY-Write on any PC that can boot from a USB key -
in a DOS
environment.
Whilst I may not have multi-tasking ability or data movement
access (PC HDDs
are not available to DOS) but it is completely portable. I save
the files
from my Windows Email to the key, reboot from the key, process
the files,
restart in Windows and email the results back.
Since doing this I have not had any run-time gremlins
whatsoever.

Marc