The True Importance of UnDo

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

What's been entirely lost in this latest, extended, muddled
morass of incomprehension and incompetence (apart from tons of
time) is the real, groundbreaking importance of this program,
which has nothing to do with UnDo or ReDo: it has to do with
controlling XyWrite from external programs. It has to do with
the "secret signal" that XyWrite alone, of all the programs on
our computers, is sensitive to, namely key 115 (and also 126).
With the fact that ANY program can send a promiscuous key 115
announcement bouncing around your whole computer, loud and clear
for any other program to listen to, WITHOUT specifically
targeting XyWrite or making any effort to specifically
communicate with XyWrite -- and yet only XyWrite responds to it.
Now that is pretty amazing. If you asked Microsoft to build
that capability into their operating system, they'd charge you
millions of dollars. The implications, and the possibilities,
are huge. It's the real purpose of the $M frame in UnDo's
program suite. UnDo itself is just a demo of this concept. I'm
sorry we couldn't spend the last 10 days talking about that
instead.

Although Harry of course elected to use the boring, conventional
Keystroke-generated Method, which doesn't exploit any of this.

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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