Re: Giving up on giving it up ...

["mhchoate" mhyerchoate@xxxxxxxx]

Hi Patricia.
Thank you for your comments. Glad to hear it isn't a completely stupid idea.
I probably need to get a flash drive anyway ... Think I'll enlist my
nephew's help (he's primarily Mac but savvy enough to keep me out of real
trouble, I think) ... he's a trip away but it would be worth it ... either
that or I'll try to find a local (small-town) professional guru .... with
good references...
Yeah, I guess I better hurry -- I need to anyway, because I want redundancy
wrt XyWrite so a hardware crash isn't fatal ....
WRT the NASA tapes, etc. ... I've heard about some historians worried about
loss of data -- because there is no paper trail .... programs needed for
reading formatted data, etc. no longer available ....  I've got big
floppies that are garbage now ... I've got small floppies I can still read
.... but probably won't get around to copying them before it's too late ...
(nothing I can't get along without) .... but still -- it bothers me ....

.... my agility level not up to the speed of technological change ....

Thanks for your help.
Marge
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patricia M. Godfrey" 
To: 
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 9:27 AM
Subject: Re: Giving up on giving it up ...
mhchoate wrote:
I'm a devoted XyWriter (DOS version 3.55) .... but have tried to give it
up, reluctantly ..... I have just given up on giving it up.
Don't give up. Xy can do things NO other app can appraoch. And it can
apparently run under even Vista, not to mention Mac and Linux (with much
tweaking).
The full screen issue you describe is one I've never heard of, but then I
run in windowed mode. Anybody? Some boxes supply a "full screen" that
isn't full; this is a hardware issue governed by the native resolution of
the screen, and is especially common on laptop LCDs.
Do computers deteriorate if sitting unused, in a box? ...
Theoretically, no. In practice, I think the heating up caused by
electricity suddenly flowing through could stress a system that had been
left "cold" for a couple of years. I'd fire them up periodically. But in
my experience, modern hardware (if it's not rejects, such as Avrom got
stuck with last time around) is pretty good.
I'm thinking about shopping for the cheapest laptops I can find, that
still have a Command Prompt that runs in Full Screen mode .... buy at
least one extra, and if cheap enough, another extra (etc.) ... load
XyWrite .... and have them handy on the shelf ... immediate backup ready
to go ....
That could well work. But you'd better do it soon. The dealers are trying
to ram Vista (loaded on boxes with far too little ram) down our throats.
And I need a way to export files to that OtherStuff computer. I'm
thinking CDs. Surely that OtherStuff computer will be able to read CDs
for a long enough time (?).
Not too sure. NASA has tapes of date from some of the early fly-bys of the
outer planets. No drive now exists that can read those tapes. I'd think a
network connection or a flash drive would be more durable. and CDs can
deteriorate. Contrary to what has been rumored here, 98 (even initial
release) can talk to XP--and presumably anything that comes down the pike
for our lifetimes--over a network.
Are we a large enough PAC to lobby Microsoft to maintain a Command Prompt
that works in Full Screen, in perpetuity?
Hah! But to be scrupulously fair, I think the full screen oddities are
BIOS related.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx