Re: A radical idea: a new XyWrite

[Myron Gochnauer goch@xxxxxxxx]

I'm afraid I have to agree with Bill.  Just look at how long NotaBene struggled to advance into the 64-bit world, even with full rights to the XyWrite code and the services of Dave Erickson.   Or those of you who are photographers know how many *years* it has taken GIMP (open sources alternative to Photoshop) to move up from 8-bit color editing to 16-bit. Even now the stable release is only 8-bit.   So what looks to us amateurs like a pretty simple porting of code turns out to be mega-person-hours of work.  (I *still* think, "How can it be that complex? Who designed these programming languages, anyway?" But apparently it *is* that complex, even for minds much quicker and brighter than mine. Sigh.)

Myron

On Apr 9, 2018, at 7:23 PM, Bill Troop mailto:billtroop@xxxxxxxx wrote:

Yes, you are. For one thing it's not just writing the program, it's getting thousands or millions of aggregate hours of testing. XyWrite is high quality code. The cheap programmers you're thinking of wouldn't know where to begin. If you look at the history of Mac and Win apps and the often mixedly successful attempts to bring them to another platform or more pertinently if you look at the efforts to rewrite Eudora from scratch, you might conclude that this is not the right question to ask. It might be possible for Dave to extend XyWrite in some desirable way, but who would pay? 

On Mon, 9 Apr 2018 at 18:50, Harry Binswanger mailto:hb@xxxxxxxx wrote:

I'm trying to go further in adapting XyWrite for the 64-bit world. I
emailed Steve Siebert about hiring the services of Dave Erickson to break
the 64k limit on program memory (and other memory). So far, no response.

But now some new and radical thoughts are piercing my brain:

1. If extending the memory is a simple matter of swapping pages in and out
of the available addressed space, do we need Dave Erickson, or could we
hire a cheap Filipino programmer to do that? (I've hired one at $7 an hour
to do _javascript_.)

2. The next thought I had was even further out. And rather heretical. How
much would it cost to hire a programmer to write a whole new program, from
the ground up, to match exactly the functionality of XyWrite? I mean such
that it would be 100% compatible, U2 and all. But 64-bit, fast, and with
vDOS plus kind of configurability.

I would, myself, want it written in Python. And there are a lot of cheap,
foreign Python programmers out there.

I wonder how long it took Dave to write it? After all, he was doing a knock
off of Atex, so maybe we can fund a knock of XyWrite.

Am I dreaming?