Kari,
I’m somewhat familiar virtual environments. They are great for many uses. However, one of the original ‘wishes’ that prompted this ‘radical idea’ thread is the wish that XyWrite could run in an environment where it could make use of the
vastly extended memory that old 16 bit machines could not. (A secondary ‘wish’ was to make the modern Windows environment resources available; such as printers, etc.)
I don’t think the virtual environment is the real problem here. The ‘legacy’ XyWrite application doesn’t know how to access it to begin with.
The original Atex editor was actually an OS unto itself. As such, it was also restricted to a 16 bit address space, but the OS knew how to page in memory when it was needed. All the editor application was to ‘ask’ for more space for the
data it was working on and it would be paged into the 16 bit address space the editor could a access.
A number of older applications that were running on the same DOS/Win3.x as XyWrite could make use of extended memory, which could be available by installing an extended memory card and paging driver to DOS during system boot-up. (I haven’t
thought about Config.sys for many years.
😊)
The problem was that XyWrite still didn't know it was there. The programs that did, such as Lotus 1-2-3, did.
Which reminds me. The Lotus people also marketed a word processor that looked remarkably like Atex/XyWrite. The name was Ami Pro. – The resemblance Atex/XyWrite may not be accidental. A number of the old Atex programmers migrated to
Lotus Corp. In Cambridge. – An equally ‘odd’ coincidence is that when Lotus got bought out by IBM, and the Ami Pro dropped. Eventually someone from that conglomeration of IBM acquisitions created Signature.)
I’d bet that Ami Pro could access paged memory.
Sent from Mail for Windows 10