Does XyWrite have any future?

["Michael Edwards" mje@xxxxxxxx]

[Joseph Fisher:]

>> I was wondering if anyone could help me with my own little project of a
>> highlight (& lowlight) abbreviated history of XyWrite over the
>> past two plus decades.

[Jordan Fox:]

>Nice to see someone attempting to do this, for the record.

   I think it would be very good for someone to put together a history of the
program, and I'd be very interested to read this when you get it done, and I
hope you can put it all in a web site somewhere, so that it can be available
generally - plus any other useful information that could be gathered from
anywhere else. I have read bits and pieces of XyWrite history on various web
sites as well as in this mailing list, but putting it all together in my mind is
rather complex.
   While I do have XyWrite, and obviously have some interest (otherwise I
wouldn't be here), I feel I have essentially missed the XyWrite era, which I
rather regret. Unfortunately, XyWrite doesn't seem to get on well with my
Windows 95, especially in 50-line mode (which I prefer), so I've never really
got into using it seriously - and it isn't really all that practical nowadays to
maintain a purely MS-DOS-based computer, which I think would probably be the
best way of running XyWrite.
   Feeling I can't live with Windows in the long term, I have long thought of
switching to Linux, and may be about to do that soon. (I've actually got the
computer with Linux on it, but there are problems there I need to sort out
first. (O.T. - but does anyone know where I could get a disk editor for Fedora
Core 2, using an Ext3 file system?))
   It doesn't really look very practical for me to use XyWrite long-term, if I
am likely to abandon Windows. I don't think XyWrite works in Linux, does it? I
will have to choose some kind of word-processor, though.
   When I was using MS-DOS programs exclusively 10 years or so ago, I didn't
have XyWrite. I would love to have had it back then, and I was intrigued when I
first heard of it, and it was described as "the world's best word-processor".
But I only managed to get it a few years ago, when I first joined this mailing
list (from a list member who kindly offered me a spare copy of it for sale).
   I still feel it is a program I would like, from what I've seen of it, so I
regret that I've probably missed the boat on this. Maybe, however good it is,
it is just rather impractical for most people to use it as their main
word-processor.

   I would be interested in any comments on why people on this list still find
it worthwhile to use it for their main word-processor, despite the direction the
computer world has taken recently, which I would have thought wouldn't favour
the continued use of XyWrite. How do they overcome the incompatibilities, make
XyWrite work with things like e-mail, graphic-style programs, the Internet, and
so on. Does the program usually work satisfactorily with most versions of
Windows? If there are secrets to this which I haven't even dreamed of, it might
give me hope that I can use this program after all.
   And dare I even hope that there are reliable ways of making it work with
Linux (which system I am probably 90-percent likely to adopt, even if it may
take me time to sort out certain problems first)?

   On another tack, I recall a question being raised on this mailing list a
while ago, but I never heard whether it got resolved. Given that the program is
no longer available (except if you can find someone with a used copy), and it
appears that the company who owned it no longer exists, I recall that someone
was trying to get formal permission from the owners for copies of the software
(and I suppose the manuals too) to be legally available to anyone who wanted to
use it.
   I suppose XyWrite is dead, long-term; but, if it has any limited life ahead
of it, this unavailability for new users would seem to be a real obstacle to
that. Someone was apparently making enquiries to get the program released to
the public domain, but I recall that there was difficulty in identifying or
contacting the person who could actually give this permission in a formal way.
Or was the person found, and they refused? I don't recall the details now.
   Does anyone know if this issue was followed up any further? Is there any
chance that it will be resolved, and the program be freely available to those
who would be interested to use it?
   It may always be a small group who use it - but I for one would be sorry if
this program just disappeared for ever, completely forgotten, never to be seen
again.

             Regards,
             Michael Edwards.