Msg: RE: A radical idea: a new XyWrite

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 I’d 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?