Running XY 3 in DOS 6.22 in this daqy and age...

["Marc" marc@xxxxxxxx]

Hello

This is not related to any particular discussion thread, but it is a
situation that happened to me recently, and how I overcame the problems.

I have a contract to extract legal information for a company that prints
(and glues in to the legislature volumes) annotations.

They use XY III and, due to a lack of in-house expertise, they are not
looking at upgrading to any other version.

When running my XPL programs on an XP based PC, I would sometimes get
strange results, pages cut-off half way, the programs just not processing
all files in the directory, etc. To overcome this I kept an old IBM 486
which I ran DOS 6.22. All was good with the world.

Then the hard drive crashed. I had a company attempt to extract the programs
off it, to no avail.
I managed to find old versions of the programs (without modifications added
later) and eventually got them up to date.

The HDD crash got me thinking, and I ended up buying a USB memory key
(256Mb), formatted it as FAT16, Sys'd it and loaded up DOS 6.22, XY, Norton
Utilities 4.5 etc.

Now I can run XY-Write on any PC that can boot from a USB key - in a DOS
environment.

Whilst I may not have multi-tasking ability or data movement access (PC HDDs
are not available to DOS) but it is completely portable. I save the files
from my Windows Email to the key, reboot from the key, process the files,
restart in Windows and email the results back.

Since doing this I have not had any run-time gremlins whatsoever.

Marc