Running xy 3+ under windows xp - aarrgghhh!

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Fred Gross wrote, "the original XyWrite was a subset of Atex." As I
recall, McGraw-Hill was setting its books and journals in Atex and wanted
something that would run on PCs for freelancers (and probably to save the
cost of buying more terminals). So it commissioned XyW. I did some
freelance work for the old Personal Computing mag back in the 80s, and
they were using XyW. They had copies of every known PC-platform word
processor around then, so they didn't MAKE me change (I was using--laugh
if you like--the Leading Edge Word Processor [it came with my first
system]) but converting was a hassle, so during a couple of hours down
time I pulled out the XyW manuals and learned how to do the basic stuff.
After I got my own copy (3.45, I think), I found myself doing some jobs
for a publishing house that was using Atex. By that time (late 80s, I
think), XyW could do things BETTER than Atex: I would read galleys and
pages and have to mark up bad breaks that Xy hyphenated correctly. Xy's
hyphenation algorithms are the best I have ever seen (apart from its
breaking its own name XyW-rite if you don't brute-force it).
Patricia