re Very sad

[OkAnnie@xxxxxxxx]

≪Remember cut-and-paste (the literal kind)? A cold shiver runs down my
spine.≫

Carl--Worst work experience of my life: At the dawn of the PC era, after
playing for a couple of years with typesetting equipment (word processing
with several advanced degrees), I took a job that required me to write on a
Selectric. Reported to someone who writes--eloquently--first word to last,
without revision, considered electric typewriters frivolous, and treated my
pleas for a clone as you would treat demands by a subordinate for a Cray.

≪TTG could've staked out new territory by combining char-based DOS and
graphical Windows in a unitary XyWrite, but ... it's a dead letter now.≫

What am I missing? I thought that this is what xyDOS 4 does. If you mean a
graphical window with dtp-like capability ... well, in the
what-might-have-been department, xyGeos anyone? The word processor with the
most seamless text/graphics integration I know is the one in the Ensemble
suite built on GEOS. The gui, compactly written in assembler, is *fast* and
object-oriented: GeoWrite makes no distinction between text and graphical
objects. GeoDraw's lone exclusive function is bitmap import. GeoWrite 2 has
xyWrite impex, and task-switching xyDos and GeoWrite under win3 gives a crude
but tantalizing hint of the kind of app I think you're describing.

But xyGeos is a dead letter with a vengeance. GEOS 1 arrived too little, too
late to dent win3, and the only names that took any notice were Borland and
AO (the AO interface I use is GEOS-based, not the dreadful winAO that gives
trade mag readers an endless supply of floppies). When Geoworks dawdled with
GEOS 2 both supporters bailed out, and when GW released v2 two-plus years ago
it froze desktop development to focus on ports for hand-held devices, sold
out partly to Novell, HP, and Nokia, and went public. GW still sells Ensemble
in much the same manner as TTG sells xyWrite (a shareware GeoWrite demo--no
filters--is available for ftp). I think of GEOS as the xyWrite of 80x86 guis:
dazzling software that didn't make the cut in the marketplace. A certain
synergy joins them, but nothing else ever is likely to. 	--annie

========================= annie fisher  nyc