RE: A radical idea: a new XyWrite

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Phil,


Hi! Are you the Savior I've been looking for? :)


By all means, see if steps can be taken. The state of ownership of
XyWrite code is unclear. It appears to be abandonware. But the previous
owners, The Technology Group, are lawyers, so proceed with
caution.


What is DOS Macro 11?


Do you think a porting would be easier than just writing a new editor in
C++ or Python? I mean, isn't writing a text editor an assignment given in
computer science classes?


Another question, if you'll be so kind. The fallback position is just to
break the 64k memory barrier (then use vDOSPlus). Am I right that it
would be fairly simple to plug into the existing code a swap of pages in
and out of memory to accomplish this?


Regards,

Harry


Hello!

 

My name is Phil White. For a time I was a programmer at Atex. Presently,
I am a retired Windows developer and database architect. I also supported
XyWrite and Atex for a while when I had a consulting business in
Florida.

 

If I could get the basic source for the XyWrite OS/ Editor program in
native DOS/Macro 11, I may be useful in porting it into Windows, which
would give it potential modern connection to all of the devices and
resources that the modern Windows process has to offer.

 

In addition, I have (potential) access to IT graduates from a local
university, (in Houston,) from which I retired several years back. I also
have current licensed Windows Visual Studio with access to a public
domain cross-platform development. In short the cross-platform utilities
facilitates simultaneous dev for several popular platforms at once.

 

Perhaps my input and expertise may be helpful in getting this effort off
the ground.

 

My retirement has (joyfully, and finally) given me a very wide selection
of things to do but Id be interested in moving the old XyWrite
functionality into the present and hopefull cement it into the
future.

 

Please let me know.

 

Sincerely,

 

Phil White

 


Sent from Mail for Windows 10

 


From:
xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx  on
behalf of Myron Gochnauer 

Sent: Monday, April 9, 2018 7:59:35 PM

To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx

Subject: Re: A radical idea: a new XyWrite

 

I'm afraid I have to agree with Bill.  Just look at how long
NotaBene struggled to advance into the 64-bit world, even with full
rights to the XyWrite code and the services of Dave Erickson.  
Or those of you who are photographers know how many *years* it has taken
GIMP (open sources alternative to Photoshop) to move up from 8-bit color
editing to 16-bit. Even now the stable release is only 8-bit.  
So what looks to us amateurs like a pretty simple porting of code turns
out to be mega-person-hours of work.  (I *still* think, "How
can it be that complex? Who designed these programming languages,
anyway?" But apparently it *is* that complex, even for minds much
quicker and brighter than mine. Sigh.)


Myron


On Apr 9, 2018, at 7:23 PM, Bill Troop
mailto:billtroop@xxxxxxxx
wrote:


Yes, you are. For one thing it's not just writing the program, it's
getting thousands or millions of aggregate hours of testing. XyWrite is
high quality code. The cheap programmers you're thinking of wouldn't know
where to begin. If you look at the history of Mac and Win apps and the
often mixedly successful attempts to bring them to another platform or
more pertinently if you look at the efforts to rewrite Eudora from
scratch, you might conclude that this is not the right question to ask.
It might be possible for Dave to extend XyWrite in some desirable way,
but who would pay?


On Mon, 9 Apr 2018 at 18:50, Harry Binswanger
mailto:hb@xxxxxxxx wrote:



I'm trying to go further in adapting XyWrite for the 64-bit world.
I


emailed Steve Siebert about hiring the services of Dave Erickson to
break


the 64k limit on program memory (and other memory). So far, no
response.



But now some new and radical thoughts are piercing my brain:



1. If extending the memory is a simple matter of swapping pages in
and out


of the available addressed space, do we need Dave Erickson, or could
we


hire a cheap Filipino programmer to do that? (I've hired one at $7 an
hour


to do _javascript_.)



2. The next thought I had was even further out. And rather heretical.
How


much would it cost to hire a programmer to write a whole new program,
from


the ground up, to match exactly the functionality of XyWrite? I mean
such


that it would be 100% compatible, U2 and all. But 64-bit, fast, and
with


vDOS plus kind of configurability.



I would, myself, want it written in Python. And there are a lot of
cheap,


foreign Python programmers out there.



I wonder how long it took Dave to write it? After all, he was doing a
knock


off of Atex, so maybe we can fund a knock of XyWrite.



Am I dreaming?