Re: Windoze questions

[nsivin@xxxxxxxx (Nathan Sivin)]

Jim:

Since there has already been a good deal of discussion of the
merits of XyWin, you may want to download some of the digests via
FTP. I don't think there has been much on comparing XYW with
WPW, so perhaps your inquiry will draw some fresh reflections.

I use XYDOS and WPW, but the latter only when I need Chinese input.
WPW has some features that XYDOS doesn't, particularly the very
large character set. It is impossible to prepare camera copy on Japan with
XYDOS, which does not provide macrons over o and u. The HP
Laserjet character sets do not support them either, which
suggests remarkable naivete. But WPW prints them graphically,
and on a fast printer (LJ4+) it doesn't take perceptibly longer.

No Chinese or Japanese input system known to me can use XyDOS
formatting (that is, work within it). Perhaps someone can tell
you whether TwinBridge works with XYW. After using TwinBridge
for some time I realized why most people use it with Word, a
program I have no use for. In WPW 6.1 it works fine with left
justification, but full justification causes random characters to
disintegrate into their component 2 bytes! Since the developers
of TwinBridge did not think to try it out with WPW6.1, they are
just coming to grips with this fatal bug now.

As for the rest, there is a lot of difference between loading
XyDos (5 sec.) and WPW (over 1 min. from the DOS prompt), and the
latter is correspondingly sludgy in operation. If you have to do
multiple search and replace, look forward to staring at the
hourglass (and my machine is 66 MHZ). You also have to navigate
complex macros to do simple things, unless you want to put every
function on toolbars.
Customization, while feasible, takes immense amounts more time than in
XYDOS.

The fundamental decision is not whether to start using Windows,
but whether to use it for the few Windows programs that you want,
or to use it for everything. I just switched from the old AskSam
to the
Windows version, v. 2, in which reports are immensely improved.
On the other hand, I am still using Quattro Pro for DOS v. 1 and
PC-File
7, which do everything I want to do, load instantly on a fast
machine, and work with great speed. I tried QPW 5, and got tired
of sitting there waiting to see anything happen. All the other
major applications I use are DOS, to avoid the flab of Windows programs, and
I never enter Windows unless I want to use WPW or AskSam. I
could of course use it to multitask DOS programs, but that is not
a need I find I have.

Like a lot of other people, I am thinking hard about moving over to
OS/2, and in fact intend to do so as soon as the full version is
out and the bugs worked out (there don't seem to be many). Then
I will be choosing between DOS, Win, and OS/2 programs. That is another reason
I am not tempted to move over to Windows programs indiscriminately.


-- Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-3325