Re: XyWrite For OS/2

[Robert Holmgren]

Carl, sorry to be so long about replying . . . What Herb Tyson means, by
underscoring the 16-bit nature of XyWrite for OS/2, is that it was developed
for OS/2 v1.x. In fact, Xy-OS/2 sounds like something developed during that
endlessly vapoury period preceding Signature -- say, 1990 or thereabouts,
'twixt 3.55 and 4.0 (as the man says). I trust you saw the review of OS/2 word
processors in _OS/2 Professional_ March 1994? It begins with this interesting
line: "For the remaining few, the still proud, the command-line mavens, the
overhead and awkwardness of any GUI-based word processor can be nearly
intolerable." The author of that article uses text-based MS Word for OS/2,
which is often called creaky (and was also developed for v1.x). At the other
end of the spectrum, I was astonished to read (in the same issue) that DeScribe
is promising an SR (Speech Recognition) version of its word processor by the
end of this year! They say that if you're able to do away with the keyboard,
computers immediately get very very small. Next goal is to chuck the console
and print directly to the brain. Or write a holograph in the air (seriously, I
saw this at IBM, ever hear of them? a pretty good technology company). A
complete PowerPC computer the size of a cigarette pack. Interestingly, SR
brings us back full circle to something quasi-CMline-ish! In other words, you
_say_ "Space leader, floating date, unabbreviated European format" to get
something like "" pushed up flush against the right margin.
Moreover, your verbal instruction is non-hierarchical -- another characteristic
of the command line! If you try to implant  using A la
carte (or whatever XyWrite's ridiculous menu system is called), you have to
click through four or five levels to embed these commands. And Heaven forbid
you don't know where Leadering might be located in the Menu hierarchy! (Where
is it, anyway? Damned if I can find it... I was amused to read somewhere
recently the comment that GUI has succeeded almost too well, having managed to
reproduce, in its profusion of icons and buttons and in-your-face pop-up
choices, the chaos and clutter of a desktop. Do you know what all those
buttons in XyWin mean? Even with very good hi-res video, about half of them
convey absolutely nothing to me by way of signification. A cursive "J" with a
diagonal red line through it? A page with a capital "Z" covering another page
with another "Z"? What is this nonsense? And where is the visual index to
them?) Anyway, an interesting thing about SR is that it scarcely works in
Windows, partially works in Apple's System 7, but really works terrific in
OS/2. Yesterday I saw a demo of an SR-based photo cataloguing system (for
collections of objects, being developed for museums) that just knocked me out.
The guy never touched his keyboard. We could look at related objects, objects
from the same donor, objects from the same period, or locale, or size or color.
Zoom or thumbnail the picture. The whole shebang. On the one hand, in it's
present state, SR seems best suited to a moron -- or maybe a computer -- with a
2000 word vocabulary. But when I consider where I was circa 1980 ... with my
Vector Graphic CP/M machine running Memorite in 64K (or was it 16K?) ... who
could ever have imagined!