Re: Is XY-Write a word-processor or a text editor?

["Steve Hayes" khanyaiis@xxxxxxxx]

On 12 Dec 00, at 14:15, Jane Van Tassel wrote:

> On 11 Dec 00, at 20:02, Michael Edwards wrote (in part):
>
> >   ... Is XY-Write a full-featured word-processor ...
> > ... or is it simply a text editor ... ?
> > ... my brother ... is a computer professional, and therefore
> > presumably knows what he is talking about ...
>
> With the greatest respect to ME's brother, that "therefore" won't stand up
> to scrutiny. My brother, too, is a computer professional -- and was one in
> the early 1960s, before any of us had learned to call them "computer
> professionals" -- and when it comes to procedures like word processing and
> text editing, he's no more likely to "know what he is talking about" than
> the celebrated man in the street.

I have to agree whole-heartedly.

At the University of South Africa, where I used to work in the Editorial
Department, we used Atex in the 1980s, and switched to XyWrite in 1987, after
a fight with the "professionals" of the Computer Services Department, who
wanted IBM's Displaywrite to be the university standard.

We pointed out that we simply could not use Displaywrite for editing, and at
one point gave a demonstration with two 286 computers side by side, one
running DisplayWrite and the other running XyWrite emulating Displaywrite,
using all the Displaywrite commands, to show that XyWrite was 10 times
faster.

Later they decided to make WordPerfect the "university standard", which
resulted in a 50%+ productivity drop for the Editorial Department (a
production bottle-neck, since all study material had to pass through the
department).

At every point, the "professionals" tried to make things difficult for the
users, to the detriment of the university. I destroyed three keyboards
bashing them in frustration with Turdperfect, which simply could not do what
I needed to do, and crashed all the time. 
Many was the time that I felt like tossing the whole computer out of the
Window, and complaining to the Department of Labour that WordPerfect was and
"unfair labour practice".

They still use WordPerfect, and I still do freelance editing for the
Editorial Department, but my frustration level has dropped somewhat, because
I now use Lotus WordPro, which edits Wordperfect files far better than
Turdperfect does, though it is still not up to the standard of XyWrite. For
one thing, XyWrite has a text-based interface, which is far easier on the
eyes for editing. Trying to edit the punctuation in a long bibliography on a
GUI screen is also a strain, and must be accounted an unfair labour practice.

The "professionals" rarely know what users want, and couldn't care less about
finding out.



Keep well,

Steve Hayes
E-mail: shayes@xxxxxxxx
  Web: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/steve.htm