XyWrite, Windows XP, etc.

["Tom Robertson" t1r@xxxxxxxx]

Folks:

Yesterday I made what turned out to be a (so far) painless step
along the road to Microsoft fame and riches.

I installed Windows XP on my main computer, a 1.5 Gig Gateway P4.

I had five main considerations:

First; XyWrite 4.018 had to run in some decent way. I still do
draft writing in XyWrite, particularly in documents I am building
from other documents, and where the XyWrite windows are simply
the best there is.

Second; I also store reference material in XyWrite. Over the
seventeen years or so I have been using a computer, I have
collected some 650 Mb of text on subjects I am interested in,
taken from downloaded newspaper and magazine articles,
newsgroups, and scanning. Stored in XyWrite, I have an efficient,
low overhead way of managing what seems to me to be an enormous
amount of data. And using Ontrack Data's PowerDesk file
management program to search across multiple directories, I have
yet to need something I can not find is a few seconds.

Third; I also have a single file called Notes that is used for
day to day work and has everything in it that has come my
way--like phone numbers and miscellany--since about 1996, with
archived files in a XNotes directory that go back to 1986. Like
all directories in XyWrite, I can search my Notes file in seconds
with one combination key stroke, entering what I want to find,
and hitting Enter.

Fourth; since about 1987, when Andy Glass first told me about it,
I have been using a program called Hotline to manage my telephone
operations. With Hotline, I am within about three calls from just
about everyone who has a phone in this country, I have some
70,000 numbers from a 1992 database of which a surprising number
are still valid. I also have a personal phone database of some
1200 numbers which are all valid. In addition, with two quick
keystrokes, Hotline dials numbers right off the XyWrite screen
(including some really long international ones.)

Fifth, I run XyWrite with a 1991 version of Microsoft Bookshelf
installed on my hard drive with Virtual CD-ROM, which is a great
complement to XyWrite's thesaurus, and also includes a good quote
file and a bunch of other stuff.

All the above works fine in XP with a couple of exceptions. The
main one is that I have not yet found out how to load XyWrite
straight to a DOS screen. I so far have to load it to a Windows
window and then go Alt-Enter to go to the full DOS screen. Not a
big problem, but I hate unnecessary keystrokes.

Further, in addition to Bookshelf 1991, I load a lot of other
CD-ROMs, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, the text from
3,000 classic books, the entire works of Shakespeare, an old
Encyclopedia Britannica, and some other stuff directly on to my
hard drive using a program called Virtual CD-ROM. You can learn
about the program at: http://www.virtualcd-online.com/

And while the version of Virtual CD-ROM I now have does not work
with Win XP, they say they will have an upgrade that will any day
now.

Finally, I load the most recent version of Microsoft Encarta into
my DVD drive, which the Virtual CD-ROM folks say I will be able
to put onto my hard drive as well in an upcoming version.

When I am talking to someone, and we start talking about places,
I go to wherever we are talking about in the Microsoft Encarta
Atlas, and I can ask questions that may sound like I have been to
that place.

Ain't it fun.

Tom Robertson