Re: XyWrite on an old laptop?

[Daniel Say say@xxxxxxxx]

" I used XyWrite in the early 1980s on an 8086 with two double-density (360K)
" floppy drives, 640K RAM. You could still run XyWrite 3.xx quite nicely on
" such a machine, or any of its successors. Any machine with a hard drive (or
" even just one working 3.5 inch 1.44 meg floppy) will run XyWrite 4.xxx (DOS)
" very nicely.  The only problem you'll find is the limited keyboard on the
" laptop, but that's certainly not a problem unique to XyWrite, and XyWrite's
" flexible keyboard definitions will enable you to keep your hands near the
" home keys for cursor movement, if you care to configure your keyboard for
" max efficiency.
	
	My 'old war story'
	I got XY3.x first for a laptop with two 720k drives
	and 640 memory. It ran fine, though I couldn't use
	the thesaurus with the speller, one had to go.

	It still runs fine, but you notice the slowness or
	writing to a floppy, which also uses more battery
	than just plain typing.

	I still have a series of "Making It Fit" articles
	from PC Laptop magazine, as well as David Rothman's
	books on getting things like XY down to essentials.

	With a hard-disk there is no problem, but you might
	have a few odd keyboard combinations or programs
	to change.

	Lightning-fast, as long as you aren't writing to disk.
	There are TSRs that might be useful, for I had a
	keyboard buffer to add a bit more to that, and an
	alarm clock TSR that I was questioned on at startup
	as utilities, before loading EDITOR.EXE.
	PKLITE or other 386 compression program made the 'kernel'
	editor.exe about 20 percent smaller on the floppy drive.

	Arr, it wa' 'orrible in those days, up to my neck
	in mud and bullets and floppy disk changes. Shudder.


						Daniel Say
	
"
" For most programs these days what once seemed incredibly powerful machines
" (your 386, e.g.), have now become doorstops, which, besides being a shame,
" has become a landfill problem.
"
" Peter Brown
" pbrown@xxxxxxxx
"
" 	>>James F. Boris writes: I'm going to be getting an old laptop to
" use just for word processing on
" > the road. It's a 386 with 1 meg of RAM. On my desktop, I've been using
" > WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS, but I just know that will run too slow on the
" > laptop. How about XyWrite? Do any of you use it on a similar machine? Is
" > the performance acceptable?
" >
"