Re: XyWrite was cool even in South Africa

[Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from "Kari Eveli"  Fri, 28 Dec 2012
12:24:50 +0200

> I stumbled on this piece of endearing memorabilia:
> http://www.esn.org.za/pipermail/comp-studies/2011q4/003700.html

Actually, I see that that remark triggered a whole subthread about
XyWrite. For the record I've reproduced it below (minus trailing quotes
and other extraneous information). Enjoy!

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[Discussions sorted by thread:
[http://www.esn.org.za/pipermail/comp-studies/2011q4/thread.html#3713]

[Comp-studies] Old age
Gerhard Griesel Gerhard.Griesel at kzndoe.gov.za
Wed Nov 16 12:36:54 SAST 2011
 
Karin says:

At school we used LOGO to learn programming and then later Basic and
Pascal.

Gerhard:

Brings back memories! In the eighties, my late wife did a two year
further diploma in computer teaching through the Pretoria College for
further training (cannot remember the exact name). At that stage I was
computer-illiterate, but that is where I heard about Logo, Basic and
Pascal for the first time. We did not own a computer, and I remember her
sitting at the dining-room table writing out the code by hand for her
assignments. Near the end of the first year, she told me that she will
need a real computer in order to answer the next assignment. I then
arranged that we access a computer at my school. We went there, but had
a problem: We did not know how to switch it on. Eventually we found the
button. She nevertheless passed the course with distinctions and went on
to teach Computer Literacy at her school. We bought our first home
computer only in 1989.

Just an aside: The departmental computer on which I am writing this
dates from 2002...

________________________________


[Comp-studies] Old age
Marius Pretorius marius at praetor.co.za
Fri Nov 18 09:00:45 SAST 2011

Ok, I have to admit, in comparison to all the other submissions here
with regards to 'old age' I'm a relative newbie. I cut my teeth on a
286AT with MS Dos 3.1. This 'box' arrived at our school in 1990 and no
one knew how to use it or what it was for. I decided that I'll give it a
bash - with the hope that the time I invest in learning how to use it
will give me wonderful returns in the future with time saving as a
teacher. That proverbial carrot is still in front of my nose.

Those were the days .. When you were regarded as a geek because you
could write a batch file to start a program 'automatically' by just
entering one letter.

How many of you remember that fantastic Word Processing program called
XyWrite? It was command line based but you could achieve almost magical
things with it - it had a whole set of commands which you could string
together and use with variables to write little macros or programs. The
first day I started using it I spent a whole night trying to create a
new file. Literally 'a whole night', into the morning hours. The help
file said press F9 to execute a command. So I tried all sorts of
permutations to create a new file - typing in the command 'ne' or 'new'
with various file names - and pressing F9. Whatever I did, this 'box'
didn't want to cooperate. The next morning I asked someone what I did
wrong - the one person in the community who knew something about
computers - the solution: I had to press ENTER instead of F9!

Then there was Ventura Publisher a powerful GUI DTP program that ran in
DOS that could do amazing things with paragraph styles and templates
etc. There was also a database program - I had to ask someone to remind
me what it was called - called Q&A. It was a flat, one table database
but for those who knew nothing better it was wonderful what sorts of
queries or filters you could create.

Those were the days .

Enjoy your day

Marius Pretorius


From: Gerhard Griesel [mailto:Gerhard.Griesel at kzndoe.gov.za]
Sent: 16 November 2011 12:37 PM
To: comp-studies at lists.esn.org.za
Subject: Re: [Comp-studies] Old age

Karin says:

At school we used LOGO to learn programming and then later Basic and
Pascal.

Gerhard:

Brings back memories! In the eighties, my late wife did a two year
further diploma in computer teaching through the Pretoria College for
further training (cannot remember the exact name). At that stage I was
computer-illiterate, but that is where I heard about Logo, Basic and
Pascal for the first time. We did not own a computer, and I remember her
sitting at the dining-room table writing out the code by hand for her
assignments. Near the end of the first year, she told me that she will
need a real computer in order to answer the next assignment. I then
arranged that we access a computer at my school. We went there, but had
a problem: We did not know how to switch it on. Eventually we found the
button. She nevertheless passed the course with distinctions and went on
to teach Computer Literacy at her school. We bought our first home
computer only in 1989.

Just an aside: The departmental computer on which I am writing this
dates from 2002...

 _____


[Comp-studies] Old age
Marius Vos Marius.Vos at xsinet.co.za
Fri Nov 18 11:33:36 SAST 2011

Hello all,

XyWrite was . cool. But at the time I was working at Rand Mines. With
the company issued with an IBM Display Writer - one on each floor of a
20 story building. (In other words "MS Word") - the Display Writer
printer sounded like a 747 about to take off at power-up, and it needed
a whole desk of its own. Floppy disk drives came in the version of old-
style LP's - 8 inch disks. The 8 inch disk drives were in the
"Mainframe" room, located on floor three of a 20 story building in
central JHB. Nobody but us techies and CEO were ever allowed in there.
Still, when we IPL'ed (Initial Program Load) the mainframe IBM Systems
370 servers, it scared everybody.

The server room in 1990 was a really scary place. Today it still is. But
it should not be. ;-)

Marius H Vos
Domain Administrator: Cape Academy for Mathematics, Science and
Technology
 mailto:Marius.Vos at xsinet.co.za>
Marius.Vos at xsinet.co.za
 mailto:Marius.Vos at CapeAcademy.wcape.school.za>
Marius.Vos at CapeAcademy.wcape.school.za
072 685 0633 (c) 021 794 3777 (h)


[Comp-studies] Old age
Pam Miller docpam at gmail.com
Fri Nov 18 11:55:22 SAST 2011

I also started using XyWrite. My neighbour worked for the Cape Times
newspaper, and often sent in copy from home. He sent it in in XyWrite.
I bought the software and used it on the 2nd hand computer I bought from
another neighbour. Three of the four units in the complex had residents
who were into computers, at home as well as in the office, so I had
support.

Neighbours and support from those close by were so influential in my
starting to use the computer. I only gave up XyWrite when I got MsWorks
for DOS.

I now realise how long I have been using computers, since sometime in
1989 or 1990 while I was doing a B.Bibl Hons degree at UWC. My lecturer
had a computer! I handed in my Honours project printed by a dot matrix
computer!

Wow, times have changed. Next year I will be teaching a post grad course
fully online at a distance.

Pam

--
****************************
Pam Miller, PhD
docpam at gmail.com
Mobile +27 72 247 9047
Fax 086 635 3708 (Local)
Twitter docpammiller
studyopp.blogspot.com


[Comp-studies] XyWrite (Was: Old age)
Gerhard Griesel Gerhard.Griesel at kzndoe.gov.za
Fri Nov 18 12:15:08 SAST 2011

Pam says:

I also started using XyWrite. My neighbour worked for the Cape Times
newspaper, and often sent in copy from home. He sent it in in XyWrite.
I bought the software and used it on the 2nd hand computer

Gerhard:

I am slightly embarrassed to say that I am still using XyWrite on a
weekly basis at home! It had (has) a brilliant spellchecker which I used
in order to do machine translations. When I was a lecturer at a distance
college, we had to lecture in both English and Afrikaans. I wrote my
notes in Afrikaans. XyWrite then translated the text into English, and
then, after the translation, automatically listed all the non-translated
words alphabetically so that they could be added to the word list. I am
still doing translations (now from English to Afrikaans). After each
translation I collect the faulty translations and add them to a find &
replace, so that next time they will be OK.

XyWrite does not run on a 64-bit OS like Windows 7, but I downloaded
DosBox and it runs through DosBox even better than it did on the old
computers. There is a website for XW users (xywrite.com).

________________________________


[Comp-studies] XyWrite (Was: Old age)
Gustav H Meyer ghmeyer at gmail.com
Fri Nov 18 14:04:54 SAST 2011

XyWrite? Wow! That was a brilliant word processor and I didn't know
that people still used it. We should get some people to port it to
Linux, but then I don't think it would beat plain old vi or emacs.


[Comp-studies] XyWrite (Was: Old age)
Vinesh maikoo v.maikoo at yahoo.com
Fri Nov 18 15:15:37 SAST 2011

All your recollections bring back good memories. I'm sure many of you
remember Wordstar. I was so proud of my preps with  .....
appearing all over the place (to bold text). If I look at my old
stiffies (stored somewhere at my home!) I'm sure I find those preps.
What about the games that ran on floppies? Remember those?


[Comp-studies] XyWrite (Was: Old age)
Mike Chiles mikec at iafrica.com
Sat Nov 19 09:50:29 SAST 2011

Talking about word processors reminds me ...

Around 1981 when the IBM PC was introduced some of the schools in the
Cape were experimenting with other "personal computers" for use in
Computer Studies. These included the Apple, the RadioShack TRS80 and
the Sharp MZ-80B. At the time VisiCalc was the big application - in
fact many will say that it was VisiCalc that moved the personal computer
from the home market into the business environment.

At the time SACS had the Sharp MZ-80B that had few if any applications.
We were doing projects at that early stage and one of the Matrics
decided that he would like to write a word processor program for the
Sharp. Obviously it was not as sophisticated as today's word processors
but one could enter and edit text, use the cursor keys to move around in
the text, save the text, read in additional text from a txt file, etc.
All written in Sharp's version of BASIC.

The learners were able to write programs/projects for whatever equipment
they liked at the time. This included the BBC Model B, the Acorn Atom,
etc. Many of these learners taught themselves machine code/assembler to
get the best out of what they were doing. They had a ball!

I also wrote a school admin system for the Sharp that was used by the
school for a number of years to print individualised reports for the
learners (at the end of exam terms), print the old E123 forms for
promotions, etc. Can you imagine printing the reports for over 600
learners on an 80-character dot-matrix printer?

The same admin system was initially developed for the Commodore
SuperPet.

MikeC


[Comp-studies] XyWrite (Was: Old age)
Roland Giesler roland at giesler.za.net
Wed Nov 23 14:05:30 SAST 2011

XYWrite was/is brilliant! Can Word do *letter* justification in a
newspaper column yet? ... (I thought so) XYWrite can. And the list may
be substantially extended. It also didn't crash as far as I can
remember, although storing documents on floppy disks catered for losing
data in a different way! LOL

I would contend that someone who has learned to use XYWrite has a far
better understanding of layout and publishing than someone who's only
used a GUI type editor/wordprocessor.

regards

Roland


[Comp-studies] XyWrite (Was: Old age)
Mike Chiles mikec at iafrica.com
Wed Nov 23 15:05:25 SAST 2011

Hi Roland

By "letter" justification do you mean kerning? The term kerning refers
to adjusting the white space between two letters.  Word can't "kern"
automatically but using the "Character Spacing" in the Font menu one can
adjust spacing between selected characters.

Have a look at http://papress.com/thinkingwithtype/text/kerning.htm
There are some notes on the history of type, some exercises on building
typographic skills, and other bits and pieces.

MikeC


[Comp-studies] Old age
Beverley Reed REEDB at reddamhouse.org.za
Fri Nov 18 12:45:18 SAST 2011

What is interesting about software is that functionality has not changed
very much at all. WordPerfect 5.1 (Dos version) can do exactly what Word
2010 does today, maybe no hyperlinks or web pages, but word processors
do that badly anyway.
Bev


[Comp-studies] Old age
Brandon Rennie bgrennie at gmail.com
Fri Nov 18 13:37:12 SAST 2011

It's so interesting to read this thread.

The kids I teach are gobsmacked to learn that when I was at university -
not even school - there wasn't a mouse, there was a program called
WordPerfect and you had to use the keys to perform activities. Are our
kids mouse-junkies?? :)

This was pre windows 95 and the world was different.

Thank you so much all for sharing. It makes it perfectly clear why when
you blackberry doesn't work for two days you need counselling.

Brandon.

--
Brandon Rennie
St Barnabas Independent School
031-564-1683 (Tel)
071-350-5589 (Cell)
086-545-9916 (Fax)


[Comp-studies] Old age
Jeff Ostrowick ostrowickj at hydepark.gp.school.za
Thu Nov 24 15:58:39 SAST 2011

Cough... MacWrite, MacPaint, Adobe Photoshop 1 all pre win95 (or as we
liked to call it Mac85) and built for WIMP. Well they'll have an easier
time over the next few years going from mouse to gesture.


[Comp-studies] Old age
Sinclair Tweedie irishman at reddamhouse.org.za
Fri Nov 25 06:15:15 SAST 2011

gesture? :-)  now THAT is a can of worms..........


[Comp-studies] Old age 20 years of operating systems
David Rogers David at bridgehouse.org.za
Wed Nov 16 23:10:11 SAST 2011

All this nostalgia has got me going. We are in exams now, but at the
start of next year, the Grade 11 class is going to install every PC
based operating system we can find. I did this last a few years ago and
was able to get appropriate hardware from a 286 upwards. This time we
are going to have to use virtual machines. I have every version of DOS
from 3.2 to 6.1, MS-Dos and DR Dos, Windows from 3.0 onwards including
the failures, ME and Vista. Server versions from NT3.5 to 2008R2. OS/2
2.1 and Warp. I have a raft of Linux versions. I will see how many we
can get to load.
Hardware is going to be a bit of a problem, but I would like to get as
many versions of Mac OS as possible. Anyone got an Apple II or a Lisa we
could borrow?

We will report on it once we have completed the task. Maybe other
schools would like to join us in "20 years of Operating Systems"?
Contact me if you would like to link up with us.

DavidR

David Rogers
IT Director
Bridge House School
Franschhoek 7690
Tel:(021) 874-8101
Fax:086 580 7771
http://www.bridgehouse.org.za

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[Comp-studies] Old age 20 years of operating systems
Mike Chiles mikec at iafrica.com
Sat Nov 19 10:06:13 SAST 2011

David, you omitted the Z80 machines running CP/M

MikeC

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--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx