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I envy Mr. Henderson the time to
be a hobbyist. I note that after 15 years of radio we had Jack Benny and
Franklin Roosevelt at the flip of a switch, after 15 years of automobiles we had the Model T, and 15 years of airplanes we had the fighter
plane. After 20 years of the PC we have what David Gelertner of Yale (victim of
the Unabomber) calls "the software mess." .
I am a writer/editor/journalist
by trade and I have used a computer for fifteen years. I don't know how to
program it any more than I know how to tune my car's engine and why should
I? For writers, the most important advance in productivity since at least
the invention of pencil was the word-processing ability to reorganize
material by moving around words, sentences, paragraphs -- i.e., ideas --quickly
and easily. In the days of paper /typewriter, this was done by circling
material, drawing lines, arrows, etc. and finally -- cutting and pasting (sound
familiar?) and then retyping. To do that, Hemingway hired a secretary to do
that; today he wouldn't have to, and he'd still have time to go fishing in the
afternoon. With Xywrite, a system was
invented to try out the reorganization of ideas, see if they worked better,
and then to try again. The material never left the screen. I have written many
newspaper stories, articles, and two books, and edited half a dozen other books
(all of which appeared on the NYTimes annual list of notable
books). During that period, I've saved maybe one million
keystrokes thanks to Xywrite, and a great deal of time and energy as
compared to Word (in addition to not using a mouse which can cause grave damage
to the hand/wrist). The alternative,Word, is truly retrograde; the
nerds who devised it obviously do not write for a living but simply
copied the now anachronistic concept of cutting and pasting (during
which words actually leave your sight and take extra keystrokes to retrieve
). The Word inventors seem to think that the way to emphasize ideas is simply to
shout by putting them in boldface; they hired a writer and editor for
The Atlantic Monthly to tell them how to make their system more attractive to
writers. He gave up after six months, offering no improvements as far as I can
determine. As this monopoly spreads like a
stain, the simple and elegant system that I learned within ten days--as long as
it took me to learn how to drive a car--is
increasingly threatened by enforced upgrades which masquerade as innovation but
really are planned obsolescence. Preserving the ability to use a simple and
effective system is one reason why this chat group exists--and however
comforting and helpful, it really should not need to exist. If a software
house could make a profit by filling this niche market--and to do so it
would need to know the codes of the constantly changing ("improving")
operating system--we wouldn't be wasting all this time exchanging tips about how
to keep our preferred stick-shift XYWrite system working without even a corner
mechanic to help. (Try to find one!) The parallel is exact;
suppose GM had been a monopoly in 1940 and forced all cars to go automatic
instead of just Oldsmobile with its Hydramatic. Small cars would be impractical (European small cars use stick shifts). The only hope is that someone will break
this monopoly as the Japanese and VW broke the Detroit oligopoly, and I
guess that's what we'll have to wait for. I don't look for much help from
some hobbyist who thinks this is all just a game. As for the antitrust people,
they lost the election. The only congressman on your side is Orrin Hatch,
because WordPerfect is based in Utah. Everyone else seems to have been either
bought out or bemused by MS.
Lawrence Malkin ----- Original Message -----
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