RE: Pre-Xy

["Chuck Creesy" creesy@xxxxxxxx]

I've been away and come to this thread late, but I can't resist. I
started with a program named "LazyWriter" which ran on Radio-Shack's
TRS-80. It was very well designed and ran remarkably well under the
limited resources available (48MB RAM and two 180K floppies if I
remember right). It was never rewritten for MSDOS and, after the PC
arrived, I did an early customization of XyWrite that imitated some of
LW's niftier features.

In the early '80s, Edwards Brothers (an Ann Arbor typesetter/printer)
devised an interface that could read LW files from TRS floppies and feed
the output to a black box that would make a Linotron 202 think it was
reading punched tape. This device translated simple tags in the text
file into the bell-codes that the Lino used for formatting instructions.
Edwards sold this system to other printers, including the one that
published the magazine I was editing at the time. It seemed miraculous
to get galleys back overnight with no typos other than those we had
committed ourselves.

The next step was BestInfo's Superpage (which actually preceded
PageMaker, though no one remembers). SP used XyWrite as its text editor.
Before long we were writing XML routines to perform all kinds of
ancillary tasks.

--Chuck Creesy,
Princeton University Press