Msg: Re: old XyWrite archive.

Somebody please remove me from these lists! I have no hope of returning to XyWrite world, the place of lost utility, but I will at least continue to use WordPerfect instead of Word. As much as possible, anyway. I can't afford Nota Bene, nor do I fully grasp it's usefulness. I'm going back to paper world anyway.

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Michael Edwards mailto:mje@xxxxxxxx wrote:

[Avrom Fischer:]

On September 23 Fred Weiner sadly reported that he had a recollection
that the older Archive had been lost by the former server. I had a
recollection that Robert was maintaining something on a server for
Xylist. Is my recollection correct. If it is what is being maintained.

I have largely fallen away from XyWrite, although I have remained on the list; but it is possible I may be able to help slightly in this.
Unable to adjust from DOS-style programs to the graphic or Windows style programs, I originally joined this list maybe 10 years ago, having heard that XyWrite was the best word-processing program *in the world*. I'm still prepared to believe that may be true (the more software today develops, the more I hate everything about the way it does things, and the less I trust in its reliability); but it didn't seem feasible to me to keep using software that was increasingly becoming archaic on the computer I was using.
I saved all the archives up to that time on my computer, and I believe they began with the very beginning of the list and continued up to the time I joined the list - which was probably around 1998 or so. They were in big, long files containing whole months or years together. I also kept the e-mails that arrived for the next several years; so I continued to keep copies of all posts for several more years.
Now we come to the problem: that computer, an older I.B.M. laptop, has not been used for quite a few years now, and I might have difficulty running it. The laptop's keyboard got damaged at some point almost to the point of unusability; but I do have another one of the same model, and, in theory at least, I may be able to swap the disks around. But I don't know if the disk is still readable - someone told me that a laptop disk left unused for a few years can become unreadable, although I have no way of knowing if that is true.
So I cannot go and retrieve those files now, and for all I know they may be irretrievably lost. (I hope not, because, if so, then I will have lost a huge lot of other stuff too. But that is the grim likelihood with my computer files, as I have had problems with other computers too.) But I did e-mail those files to another member of this list because she lost her own copies and didn't seem to be available on the then list-server at the time (probably 9 or 10 years ago), although I'm not sure if they'd permanently disappeared at that time.
Until she gives the go-ahead, I won't say who it is, because I don't know if she would want me to identify her publicly. But if she were willing (and still had the files) it may be possible to get them from her. If anyone wishes to know who it is, they can e-mail me privately about this and I will tell them who it is. Meanwhile the member may read this and know it is she I am referring to, and may mention it herself. And of course I suppose it's possible other members saved those archives on their own computers too.
Failing that, I would be perfectly happy to make the files available myself - if they are still readable, and if I can organize myself to look into how to read them again. And I have to say that's a rather big "if", because I am struggling with mental health issues and this severely impacts on my ability to keep all my computer-related activities organized, and I have many thousands of e-mails on various old computers (including all my older e-mail) in a state of total chaos. So if I were able to help one day with this, it may well be years ahead - and (I have to say) may never happen at all, as depression continues to plague my life with seemingly no improvement.
But I just thought I would mention this slim possibility, for what it's worth. I would suggest that approaching the member to whom I e-mailed those files might be the best approach to this, at least in the first instance. If anyone wants to follow this up, please e-mail me privately and we'll go on from there.

Regards,
Michael Edwards.