In the merry days of DOS, before Bill Gates strutted onto the stage,
XyWrite was a major player. Most newspapers and many magazines were written with
XyWrite because it was widely regarded as the most powerful word processor in
the business. XyWrite had muscles, to be sure, but you had to know where to look
for them. Perhaps the most unfriendly piece of software ever written, XyWrite
demanded that its users learn thousands of commands and execute them
perfectly.
There were no drop-down windows, no explanatory notes, no
multiple-choice options. If you didn't learn the commands, you looked at a blank
screen forever. It's no wonder why XyWrite failed in the home-computer
marketplace, but for professional writers who had no choice but to learn the
system, it could be a thing of beauty-not of the warm, cuddly variety, mind you,
but coldly efficient beauty (think of one of those Margaret Bourke White photos
of giant generators or the inards of a steel mill). When you mastered XyWrite,
you felt like you'd really done something, given that old left brain the kind of
workout it rarely gets when it's trapped in the body of a mere book
reviewer.
And, oh, those commands! Learning the XyWrite commands was easier if
you made up stories to function as memory keys. My favorite was the SAD command.
SAD stood for "save as defined," but I could never remember that. Usually, I
used the SAD command when I was blocking off a chunk of lame prose that I was
about to cut from a review. I remembered the right command by reminding myself
that this cruel act I was about to perform would be certain to cause SADness,
both to the words themselves, exiled to cyberspace, and to the author, who
inexplicably seemed to believe that it was the finest line he or she had ever
written. It's simply untrue, as some have suggested, that a little smile crossed
my face every time I typed SAD on the screen and summarily deleted the offending
phrase.
I also loved XyWrite's error messages. Harking back to an era of
stern taskmasters who refused to tolerate sloppiness, XyWrite had little
sympathy for those who did it wrong. If you typed the wrong command, there would
be no friendly offers to help. No, XyWrite laid it on the line: "Bad Command."
You did it wrong, and there's no use doing it again until you figure out how to
do it right. My favorite XyWrite error message (borrowed from DOS) occurred when
you tried to save or copy a file in a bogus manner. XyWrite didn't even bother
telling you'd done it wrong; it simply said, "Access Denied." The message was
clear: you don't know enough to do what you're doing; practice harder and try
again. So refreshingly undemocratic! So flagrantly in violation of the Library
Bill of Rights!
Learning XyWrite was a lot like learning the multiplication tables.
There were no shortcuts, no programmed positive reinforcement, no rhetoric
whatsoever. But when you learned what seven times three was, you didn't forget.
(I remembered that one by telling myself that seven times three equaled when I
would be old enough to drink.) I doubt if I'll ever know Word as well as I
knew XyWrite because, a mere click away, there's always a menu ready to
nurse me through the problem. I'm sure most people are thrilled to be living in
a drop-down world, and I wish them well. For my part, I'll try my best to get
with the program (although I make no promises about reinventing myself for this
or any other millennium). I reserve the right, however, to offer the occasional
toast to my old friend, the ever-crotchety XyWrite. After all, I knew him well.
-Bill Ott