Re: XyWrite history?

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

I was using XyWrite in (about) early 1981. To make life complicated
I had an Olivetti PC; the old among might remember that PC clones
back then were more like fraternal twins than clones.
I spent many a dinner hour on the phone with Dave Erickson who was
incredibly helpful and willing to listen to all my desiderata vis a
vis footnotes/endnotes, foreign symbols, math symbols, etc. Since I
had spent my high school and college years programming, and since I
had runoff (sic!) my dissertation on a main frame, it struck me as
entirely normal that the XyWrite would contain a programming
language. I was particularly happy when parsing and containment got
added to XPL.
 My needs weren't usually arcane (nor were they unusually arcane). 
But I often ended up helping people whose needs were. I helped a
French scholar produce a manuscript that contained an author's
original text, quotes of sources from which that author had
"borrowed", and the scholar's commentary. Those three kinds of texts
were marked by different typography. Among other things I had to
figure out how to manage the French quote system, where guillemets
are continued in the left margin through the length of the quote (and
that has to survive editing). We ended up, with the diskettes, in a
stone farmhouse at the end of a muddy lane in deepest France. After
coffee in the primitive kitchen, warmed by a wood-burning stove, we
marched through a door into the 20th century--lots of computers. Our
host changed from genial farmer to nerd. I explained the XyWrite
codes to him, he fiddled for half an hour, read in the diskettes and
had them all translated into the raw material for his typesetter.

On Aug 6, at 1:30 PM, Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:
> But I could go on all day about this.
>
> Patricia M. Godfrey