"...XyWrite to its knees"

["Carl L. Distefano" CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx]

I finally heard from David Harris, who was out of town when his mail
server went haywire and began regurgitating messages to this list. He
asked me to "send my apologies to the list for what I did to them, and
assure them that it won't happen again." He went on to say what had
happened, and why it won't happen again. Herewith his comments:

-> I had stopped culling and deleting my email on my local server,
-> and there's a limit (which I didn't know about) to how many
-> messages it can store in my name (1K, as it turns out). So
-> there was no more room, and everything got bounced. I've
-> solved the problem by unsubscribing from the [XyWrite] list and
-> putting my other mailing list into a separate folder.
-> (Actually the sysadmin did that for me, but close enough. When
-> your ISP is a guy who lives down the road, the service tends to
-> be pretty good and personal.) I felt free to drop the list
-> because (a) I don't understand most of what you guys are
-> talking about anyway, and (2) (as Paul Buchman would say) I've
-> finally stopped using XyWrite.
-> 
-> Yes, the sky has fallen. As we know, XyWin was not designed to
-> work with Win95, and sometimes doesn't. (It was designed to
-> work with Windows 3.1, and still sometimes didn't.) But its
-> advantages for me (since I don't do a lot of fancy stuff) were
-> dwindling. The last thing I really needed Xy for was its
-> ability to save sessions. I like that feature a lot, enough to
-> make up for the problems of getting footnotes on the
-> appropriate pages. But with Microsoft Binder and Word 97 I can
-> define keys to my heart's content (the Xywrite Change Case key
-> has migrated, for example, although it's less necessary because
-> Word capitalizes the first letter of a sentence even if you
-> don't, if you don't tell it not to), I don't have to worry
-> about where the footnotes will be (important now that I'm
-> writing formal papers for my degree program), and I can treat
-> an entire book as one file with Binder. The files aren't all
-> open at once, but it's a mouse-click from one to the next,
-> which is good enough. And I can have reasonable filenames,
-> like "Long critical paper" and "Magic Penguin Chapter 1".

I "converted" David to Xy (from Wordstar) back in the late '80s, so his
departure from the fold is poignant for me. I must say, however, that
XyWrite's perennial inability to place footnotes properly is indeed a
major pain in the butt -- one that I'm feeling acutely right now as I
make final revisions to a 50-page appellate brief. This shortcoming
has prompted one of my partners (one of two remaining Xy-stalwarts in
an otherwise WordPerfect firm) to fall back on another word-processor
for any document with footnotes. I don't blame him. The problem is an
embarrassment that absolutely MUST be fixed in SmartWords and (dare we
hope?) one valedictory, slam-bang revision -- v4.10 finally? -- of
Xy4DOS.

In the meantime, adios, Dave. See ya soon in the real world.


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Carl Distefano * * * CLDistefano@xxxxxxxx
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cc: David M. Harris