The XyWrite Piece

[TBaehr@xxxxxxxx]

Nice article, Amy. Just a couple of factoids you missed:

The IBM product was called Signature, and it ran abysmally even in DOS. That's
the one we stickered over the IBM name. Afterwards it was renamed XyWrite 4
(its original name before IBM got involved) and tried to market it on our own.

XyWin was eschewed not because it had menus and dialog boxes (Xy4DOS does too;
I'll get to that) but because it was buggy and crashed a lot. Also, its draft
font was hard to read, at least for some. The Windows version had a command
line, and you could still do most stuff without ever seeing a menu.

I worked on the menus and dialogs, written entirely in XPL. Even the DOS
version has menus and dialogs, all of them patterned after a common user
interface that Windows folks would not find strange. (The command-line users
don't like the menus in either DOS or Windows -- or Windoze, as some call it.
I use both menus and the command line. It's nice to have the option.)

Xy4DOS was a fairly major upgrade, mostly "under the hood," with speed
enhancement and bug fixes but not a lot of new features. I added quite a few
menus routines and continued to develop menus-based routines after I left
XyQuest/TTG.

You can still have Xy4DOS if you can find a computer with a 5 1/4-inch disk
drive and a 3 1/2-inch drive. Most of the files, when expanded, will fit on a
3 1/2 inch floppy, and you can simply copy them to the smaller disk and then
to your own computer.

There's nothing special about the installation process; once the program is
installed, you can create diskettes with all the files and simply stick them
into a new computer.

The printer drivers for Hewlett Packard work on most laser printers that have
or emulate H-P's PDL (page description language) version 3 or above . I'm
running Xy4DOS with an HP IIIP, a Brother, and an HP 6se. If you can get
Speedo fonts from Bistream, you can print in lots of fonts, sizeable from
about 4 points to 144 points. If you decide to do this, write me and I'll
guide you through the process.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip; I hope your readers get the sense that XyWrite
was, and is, a "writer's word processor."

Tim Baehr