Re: Xywrite Salon article; The text for our XYwrite archives

[Daniel Say say@xxxxxxxx]

... reading it into the XYwrite archives.

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 ----- page one
  Click here for the Mercedes-Benz European Delivery Program

 
 
  [LINK] 21st books . [INLINE]

  Salon

  _A L S O__T O D A Y_
 
  to feature
  Wired: The book
  By Andrew Leonard
  A former Wired insider lands a contract to tell the magazine's
  rise-and-fall saga

  -->- - - - - - - - - --->
 
  _T A B L E__T A L K_
 
  Is the Web still an all-white ghetto? Discuss race and the Internet in
  the Digital Culture area of Table Talk

 
 
  - - - - - - - - - -
 
  _R E C E N T L Y_The Xy files
  By Amy Virshup
  For the rest of the world, XyWrite is history -- but to its devotees,
  the antiquated word processor still rules
  (08/25/98) -->
 
  Revolt of the couch potatoes
  By Howard Wen
  When TV fans want to save a favorite show from cancellation, they
  organize online. But do the networks care?
  (08/24/98)
 
  The 21st Challenge No. 12 Results
  By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
  What does HTTP://WWW stand for?
  (08/21/98)
 
  Suicide watch on the Net
  By David Cassel
  When chat room participants say they're going to kill themselves, what
  should service providers do?
  (08/20/98)
 
  Wired: The book
  By Andrew Leonard
  A former Wired insider lands a contract to tell the magazine's
  rise-and-fall saga
  (08/20/98)
 
  A bug too far
  By Janelle Brown
  In Ultima Online, fed-up players carry a crusade from the fantasy
  world into a real-life courtroom
  (08/19/98)
 
  - - - - - - - - - -
 
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  t h e-----X y-----f i l e s
 
  21st feature - - - - - --->
 
  FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD, XYWRITE IS HISTORY --
  BUT TO ITS DEVOTEES, THE ANTIQUATED WORD PROCESSOR STILL RULES.
 
  BY AMY VIRSHUP | _N_ot long ago, a writer friend and I were talking
  software (there's a sentence I never thought I'd write) --
  specifically whether we were Luddites for resisting a Windows 98
  upgrade. Well, she said, she hardly felt out-of-date, since most of
  her publishing-world friends were still using XyWrite. I was stunned.
  I hadn't even heard the name in years, and suddenly I'd learned that,
  in a world in which six months is a generation, there lingered a
  dedicated cadre of loyalists to a program that hasn't been upgraded
  since 1993, that still runs best in DOS, that isn't compatible with
  most printers, and that has all but vanished as a commercial product.
  It was like finding out that a cargo cult was operating down the hall
  from my apartment.
 
  For those of you unfamiliar with XyWrite -- the "GOD of word
  processors," as one poster to alt.folklore.computers recently put it
  -- the program was an offshoot of ATEX, which in the '80s was the
  standard in newspaper and magazine editorial hardware and software. It
  was created in 1982 by an ATEX programmer named David Erickson, who'd
  bought a PC and was unhappy with the word processor that came with it.
  So Erickson decided to write his own, and not long after he and
  another employee left ATEX to set up shop as XyQuest.
 
  XyWrite was fast, it could do things no other word processor at the
  time could (like open two windows simultaneously), and because of the
  nature of the underlying programming language, XPL, it could be
  endlessly customized. The screen was a blank page with a command line
  at the top (hitting F5 would take you there), and when you wanted
  XyWrite to do something, you simply typed in an English-language
  command (such as "print" to print a file) or used one of your own
  custom keystrokes to carry out the task. It was defiantly not a "what
  you see is what you get" program, but it was extremely transparent,
  with all the formatting information easily viewable. And it was an
  instant hit among professional writers and editors, many of whom, um,
  borrowed their copies from their employers on a single 5 1/4-inch
  floppy -- mine, I confess, came from New York magazine, circa 1984.
 
  Nancy Friedman was editorial director at Banana Republic when the
  clothing retailer started using XyWrite (version 2). "I loved it,"
  says Friedman. "All of a sudden I was using this program that thought
  the way a writer thinks. All other word processing programs were
  created for secretaries -- they're all about creating standard one
  page documents. This one really expected that I was doing
  sophisticated editing and writing."
 
  High-profile devotees included television's Brit Hume, John Judis of
  the New Republic and high-tech guru Esther Dyson. Critics called it
  the "Porsche 911 Carrera" or the "velociraptor" of word processors.
  And as much as they admired the software, users also loved the
  scrappy, down-home nature of the company: Erickson would sometimes
  answer tech support calls himself, and XyQuest was headquarted in
  decidedly unglamorous Billerica, Mass. "I was always so happy driving
  through Billerica knowing they were working to update XyWrite,"
  remembers one writer who had occasion to pass through town in
  XyWrite's heyday. "It sounds so dopey, but that's how it was."
 
  But XyQuest's marketing was never as good as its software, and it
  lacked the resources to compete with the big boys -- like WordPerfect,
  which the XyWrite faithful held in contempt. Then, in early 1990, IBM
  stepped in. The computer giant announced it was hooking up with
  XyQuest to create a new product, called Signature, based on the
  XyWrite model, and it looked like XyWrite was about to join the
  commercial mainstream. Instead, IBM delayed the product for a year and
  a half -- then, with boxes printed and diskettes ready to go, decided
  it was getting out of the software business altogether. A
  reconstituted XyQuest tried to sell the program on its own (renamed
  XyWrite 4), simply slapping stickers over the IBM logos on the boxes,
  says Tim Baehr, then a XyQuest programmer. But "sales just got lower
  and lower. We were bleeding money."
 
  _N E X T_P A G E_ .|.The world has moved on, but the XyWriters keep
  faith- - - - - - - - - - - --->_N E X T____P A G E_ .|. We're drunk
  and we're naked and we're not going to take it anymore!-->
  -->ILLUSTRATION BY BART NAGEL -->
 
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--- page two

Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 07:57:38 -0700
X-within-URL: http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/08/25feature2.html

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 			-- [ much repeated fore-material deleted ] --                 
  - - - - - - - - - -

  THE XY FILES | PAGE 2
  - - - - - - - - - -
 
  By 1992, the company -- which at that point consisted of fewer than 10
  people -- was sold to a Baltimore outfit called the Technology Group,
  which needed a word processor for the "intelligent systems" software
  it was developing. The Technology Group did come out with one more
  major upgrade of the product -- a Windows version that many of the
  faithful still eschew because it has, God forbid, menus. Word achieved
  market dominance. And that's where the story should end: The world
  moved on.
 
  Well, most of the world. But out there, hidden though they were, the
  XyWriters, like early Christians, have held on. Technology Group
  president Kenneth Frank won't give out sales figures, but he says
  there's still a steady stream of purchases each month (the software
  now lists for $495, but most people go for the $129 "competitive
  upgrade"). And though there are users like Pete Wilkinson, a writer
  for Rolling Stone and other magazines, who still runs his (circa 1986)
  software on a Leading Edge that may or may not have a hard drive
  (Wilkinson isn't sure), the majority are, in fact, tech-savvy types
  running it on Pentiums or even, like devotee Wendell Cochran, a
  home-built Linux box.
 
  About 200 of them have banded together electronically on a listserv
  maintained by Nathan Sivin, a history of science professor at the
  University of Pennsylvania. And then there are the power users like
  Carl Distefano, a New York lawyer who uses XyWrite (insiders shorthand
  it to Xy for the DOS version, XyW for Windows) as the interface to his
  operating system (OS/2), to dial his phone and to keep his personal
  calendar, among other things. Distefano maintains XyWWWeb, a
  cornucopia of Xy extensions written by him and other power users. "It
  becomes yours in a way that no other program does," he says,
  explaining his devotion. "The various commands and gestures become
  part of your way of thinking."
 
  Though the XyWriters mostly deny they're a cult ("we're too cranky and
  individualistic for that" is the standard line), they in fact bear all
  the hallmarks of sectdom. They have a gospel: Herb Tyson's "XyWrite
  Revealed," a programming guide to Version 3. They are plagued by
  numerous devils: From the Beast in Redmond, whose Word program the
  XyWriters dismiss as "a typewriter pool program," to the Technology
  Group, the false messiah that, as one typical XyWriter put it,
  "care[s] nothing about the hyperloyal users, & [is] narrow-minded,
  unhelpful, surly, evasive, inconsistent, & untrustworthy." (Kenneth
  Frank says he's used to the list's vituperation.) And they certainly
  suffer for their faith: Installing the program requires doing things
  like first disabling your CD-ROM drive.
 
  Nancy Friedman of Banana Republic had so much trouble getting hers to
  run on her new Pentium that she finally had to downgrade her chip from
  a 166 to a 133. "It won't install on a fast chip," she says (an
  assertion others deny). Loading it "took days of hand holding from the
  Technology Group and consultations with the list," says Friedman. "But
  you feel like you've climbed Mount Everest when it all pops up." New
  York writer Elizabeth Royte was struggling to print the second chapter
  of her book on her husband's printer (printing and faxing can be
  especially difficult using Xy) when I called to talk. Still, she said,
  she was steadfast: "I'm a person who believes that the old ways are
  the best ways. There's no need for anything else."
 
  Indeed, if the XyWriters resemble any other sect, it's the Shakers
  (except, of course, for that celibacy thing) in that they prize
  utilitarian simplicity above all else. Wilkinson, who is on the verge
  of conceding defeat and switching to Word because the local Kinko's
  will no longer convert his 5-inch floppies to the 3.5-inch disks the
  rest of the world has been using for half a decade, sums up his
  devotion thusly: "It works. It moves sentences around." With their
  customized keyboards and fierce anti-mouse bias, the XyWriters see
  themselves as stalwart holdouts against the increasing corporate
  grayness of the computerized world. Royte's husband, Peter Kreutzer,
  was a user for almost eight years. "I loved the fact that it was
  customizable," he says, though he concedes there were periods when he
  spent "as much time configuring my keyboard as writing. It was a sad
  day giving it up. I realized I was homogenizing myself. It made all
  the practical sense in the world, but I didn't want to do it," he
  says.
 
  I, too, gave XyWrite up. In my case, it was sometime during a computer
  upgrade, when I just couldn't be bothered to load it once again (more
  importantly for the XyWriters, Dyson and her colleagues at EDventures
  recently abandoned the program as well). And yet, when I began talking
  to the faithful, I started to feel the pull of what New York writer
  Ray Tennenbaum calls "the Aristotelian elegance" of the program --
  that moment when "you're running it as a full-screen DOS session and
  it's nothing but you, the keyboard and a black screen with a little
  command line at the top -- like Courier on 8 1/2 -by-11 paper, plain
  and all's you need."
 
  "Come back, come back," Tennenbaum called softly over the phone, like
  a shepherd coaxing a lost member of the flock. I confess I was sorely
  tempted. After I hung up, I even dug through my boxes of old disks,
  looking for my master copy of XyWrite. Soon, I held the 5-inch floppy
  in my hand like the Holy Grail. And I longed to throw off the ornate
  trappings of Word -- menus, mouse, toolbar, feh! -- and get back to
  the essentials.
 
  Then I remembered that my computer doesn't have a 5-inch drive. The
  piece of plastic I was holding was like some holy relic from a lost
  sect, useless, its meaning unrecoverable. Paradise lost, indeed.
  SALON | Aug. 25, 1998
 
  Amy Virshup, a senior editor at SmartMoney, wrote this piece with
  Microsoft Word.
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