Xy development team

[TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]

Dave Erickson was (is) the master architect of XyWrite, and there were several
able draftsmen and draftswomen working for him. I *think* he would have been
happy, at least in '92 or so, to keep XyWrite as a command-line-only product
and not follow the Windows "fad." His expertise in those days was not in Win
programming or in "C" (I would guess he's mastered both by now). But his
antipathy to "C" was born of philosophy, not ignorance. Learning "C" would
have been a walk in the park for him.

Assembler was a different matter: Dave could, and did, debug code by reading
printouts or on-screen displays.

Other geniuses included Tom Dunn, Craig Cervo, Joel Strandberg, Ron "Red"
Bakerian, Roy Berger, and Sam Cheung (probably one of the last remaining SW
engineers from the old days, if he's still there). Other names escape me.
Craig was sort of the head guy outside Dave's office, and he kept things
going. Joel had come from a publishing/page composition background, which was
valuable for the kinds of things we wanted XyWrite to do. "Red" was our
graphics guy. Roy, I think, worked on Windows stuff and on early
implementations of DDE and proto-SmartWords. Tom was a bit of a cowboy, IMO.
Droll, very likeable (but weren't we all?), he often came up with brilliant
ideas and solutions that worked as conceived but sometimes brought the Editor
crashing down around our heads. ("Didn't you test it?" "Well, sure, but maybe
not on two paragraphs in a row.") Doug Kramer, Avi Rakhsha, and I were the
menus team. Avi was a "real" programmer who was a bit out of his element in
XPL (tho he was very good at it). Doug and I had come from the ranks of
enthusiasts. Both of us had done extensive XPLing in XYIII, selling some of
our stuff to the aftermarket. Christine Madsen also contributed some great XPL
solutions. The entire crew is listed in the DLG file in a "C" frame called
Credits.

One "problem" with XPL is that it allowed us to make Xy do things beyond its
lean-and-mean "mission." It was great if users wanted to customize Xy (that's
what it was for), but I clashed with Dave on a couple of occasions when DLG
code would string together functions and create new functionality. Dave: What
did you do that for? Me: It's a good feature that will save users keystrokes
and besides, WordPerfect has a similar feature. Dave: If I wanted that feature
in XyWrite, I would have put it in the engine.

For good or ill, the menus developers were former users/enthusiasts for whom
adding features was the most fun imaginable. Dave was good about reining us
in; I suspect that some of our "features" irritated the hell out of him.

When Xyquest was still making money, our tech support was an industry legend.
Free (but a toll call) and thorough; extremely patient and friendly. In the
earliest days, Dave himself took some calls.

So, back to Dave: a gentle, quiet, thorough, shy, master builder.

God, we had fun.

Tim Baehr
tbaehr@xxxxxxxx