Re: Windows vs DOS XyWrite vs the future?

[hseaver@xxxxxxxx (Harmon Seaver)]

> 2. I found that there were so few applications being written for OS/2
> that one had little choice. IBM has the economic clout to make that

  Come, come, now, Nathan, have you looked on Hobbes? Who cares if WP doesn't
write for OS/2? Have you tried Describe? Geez -- that's a million miles ahead
of WP. How about Ami-Pro by Lotus -- that looks like it will easily take over
the academic niche from XyWrite and Notabene. There is no end of very good and
very, very cheap OS/2 shareware -- much of which is better than dos commercial
apps. Take Yarn or Kwqmail or Bluewave/2 or
Describe, or TE/2 -- or take a look at FM2, the filemanager that puts all dos
or windoz filemanagers to shame, for $40.

 hell of a lot of overhead just to get XyDOS to run a little faster and to
> multitask (which is not one of my main desiderata).

  Just running XY a little faster wasn't the point, running in a stable,
non-crashing environment is, and if your work habits allow you the luxury just
doing one thing at a time, i.e., waiting 20 minutes or an hour while a print
job finishes or a large file downloads, well, I don't know what do say. It much
be nice. You can go look out the window awhile or chat up the new cute
secretary down the hall, I guess. 8-)

> > A LOT of developers flatly refuse to write for OS/2. Not only did NEC, >
Gateway, and IBM make it clear that they have no plans to write a driver > for
my CD-ROM drive, but WordPerfect decided to give away "adapter" files

  What model CD-ROM do you have that isn't supported, anyway. I'll bet there
is a driver for it. And you certainly could have used the generic driver that
came out in the 2.0 service pack -- that works with everything.
Or you could have loaded the dos drivers in a VDM window, which is what
I did.

 for gooeys, and watching PC's evolve toward being bad imitations of the
> Macintosh, I decided last year that, for Chinese etc., the time had come > to
move to Mac and Unicode. I have just postponed a year because just at > that
time the PowerPC macs came out, and I would prefer to let my > esteemed
colleagues do the gamma testing. Unless I see the changes you > predict taking
place within the next year, over I switch.

  And abandon XY altogether, eh? Don't be so hasty, Nathan, because the
Mac is now a PowerPC and will probably be running a version of OS/2 shortly.
Apple is definitly moving into the IBM world, working hand and glove with IBM
and Motorola to evolve software and hardware that works together -- the hacker
ethic at work. And, to help defeat MS, I might add.


Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx

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