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I do not remember whether I sent this article to the xylist. Even if
I did it still is worth reading.
Avrom
Copyright 1998 Salon.com, Inc.
Salon.com August 25, 1998 Tuesday SECTION: Feature LENGTH: 1636 words
HEADLINE: The Xy files
BYLINE: By Amy Virshup
HIGHLIGHT:
The Xy files: By Amy Virshup. For the rest of the world, XyWrite is history -- but to its devotees, the antiquated word processor still rules. BODY: Not long ago, a writer friend and I were talking software (there's a sentence I never thought I'd write) -- specifically whether we were Luddites for resisting a Windows 98 upgrade. Well, she said, she hardly felt out-of-date, since most of her publishing-world friends were still using XyWrite. I was stunned. I hadn't even heard the name in years, and suddenly I'd learned that, in a world in which six months is a generation, there lingered a dedicated cadre of loyalists to a program that hasn't been upgraded since 1993, that still runs best in DOS, that isn't compatible with most printers, and that has all but vanished as a commercial product. It was like finding out that a cargo cult was operating down the hall from my apartment. For those of you unfamiliar with XyWrite -- the
"GOD of word processors," as one poster to alt.folklore.computers recently put
it -- the program was an offshoot of ATEX, which in the '80s was the standard in
newspaper and magazine editorial hardware and software. It was created in 1982
by an ATEX programmer named David Erickson, who'd bought a PC and was unhappy
with the word processor that came with it. So Erickson decided to write his own,
and not long after he and another employee left ATEX to set up shop as XyQuest.
XyWrite was fast, it could do things no other word
processor at the time could (like open two windows simultaneously), and because
of the nature of the underlying programming language, XPL, it could be endlessly
customized. The screen was a blank page with a command line at the top (hitting
F5 would take you there), and when you wanted XyWrite to do
something, you simply typed in an English-language command (such as "print" to
print a file) or used one of your own custom keystrokes to carry out the task.
It was defiantly not a "what you see is what you get" program, but it was
extremely transparent, with all the formatting information easily viewable. And
it was an instant hit among professional writers and editors, many of whom, um,
borrowed their copies from their employers on a single 5 1/4-inch floppy --
mine, I confess, came from New York magazine, circa 1984.
Nancy Friedman was editorial director at Banana Republic when
the clothing retailer started using XyWrite (version 2). "I loved
it," says Friedman. "All of a sudden I was using this program that thought the
way a writer thinks. All other word processing programs were created for
secretaries -- they're all about creating standard one page documents. This one
really expected that I was doing sophisticated editing and writing."
High-profile devotees included television's Brit Hume, John
Judis of the New Republic and high-tech guru Esther Dyson. Critics called it the
"Porsche 911 Carrera" or the "velociraptor" of word processors. And as much as
they admired the software, users also loved the scrappy, down-home nature of the
company: Erickson would sometimes answer tech support calls himself, and XyQuest
was headquarted in decidedly unglamorous Billerica, Mass. "I was always so happy
driving through Billerica knowing they were working to update XyWrite, "
remembers one writer who had occasion to pass through town in
XyWrite's heyday. "It sounds so dopey, but that's how it was."
But XyQuest's marketing was never as good as its software, and
it lacked the resources to compete with the big boys -- like WordPerfect, which
the XyWrite faithful held in contempt. Then, in early 1990, IBM
stepped in. The computer giant announced it was hooking up with XyQuest to
create a new product, called Signature, based on the XyWrite model,
and it looked like XyWrite was about to join the commercial
mainstream. Instead, IBM delayed the product for a year and a half -- then, with
boxes printed and diskettes ready to go, decided it was getting out of the
software business altogether. A reconstituted XyQuest tried to sell the program
on its own (renamed XyWrite 4), simply slapping stickers over the
IBM logos on the boxes, says Tim Baehr, then a XyQuest programmer. But "sales
just got lower and lower. We were bleeding money."By 1992, the company -- which
at that point consisted of fewer than 10 people -- was sold to a Baltimore
outfit called the Technology Group, which needed a word processor for the
"intelligent systems" software it was developing. The Technology Group did come
out with one more major upgrade of the product -- a Windows version that many of
the faithful still eschew because it has, God forbid, menus. Word achieved
market dominance. And that's where the story should end: The world moved
on.
Well, most of the world. But out there, hidden though they
were, the XyWriters, like early Christians, have held on. Technology Group
president Kenneth Frank won't give out sales figures, but he says there's still
a steady stream of purchases each month (the software now lists for $495, but
most people go for the $129 "competitive upgrade"). And though there are users
like Pete Wilkinson, a writer for Rolling Stone and other magazines, who still
runs his (circa 1986) software on a Leading Edge that may or may not have a hard
drive (Wilkinson isn't sure), the majority are, in fact, tech-savvy types
running it on Pentiums or even, like devotee Wendell Cochran, a home-built Linux
box.
About 200 of them have banded together electronically on a
listserv maintained by Nathan Sivin, a history of science professor at the
University of Pennsylvania. And then there are the power users like Carl
Distefano, a New York lawyer who uses XyWrite (insiders shorthand it
to Xy for the DOS version, XyW for Windows) as the interface to his operating
system (OS/2), to dial his phone and to keep his personal calendar, among other
things. Distefano maintains XyWWWeb, a cornucopia of Xy extensions written
by him and other power users. "It becomes yours in a way that no other
program does," he says, explaining his devotion. "The various commands and
gestures become part of your way of thinking."
Though the XyWriters mostly deny they're a cult ("we're too
cranky and individualistic for that" is the standard line), they in fact bear
all the hallmarks of sectdom. They have a gospel: Herb Tyson's " XyWrite
Revealed," a programming guide to Version 3. They are plagued by numerous
devils: From the Beast in Redmond, whose Word program the XyWriters dismiss as
"a typewriter pool program," to the Technology Group, the false messiah that, as
one typical XyWriter put it, "care s nothing about the hyperloyal users, &
is narrow-minded, unhelpful, surly, evasive, inconsistent, & untrustworthy."
(Kenneth Frank says he's used to the list's vituperation.) And they certainly
suffer for their faith: Installing the program requires doing things like first
disabling your CD-ROM drive.
Nancy Friedman of Banana Republic had so much trouble getting
hers to run on her new Pentium that she finally had to downgrade her chip from a
166 to a 133. "It won't install on a fast chip," she says (an assertion others
deny). Loading it "took days of hand holding from the Technology Group and
consultations with the list," says Friedman. "But you feel like you've climbed
Mount Everest when it all pops up." New York writer Elizabeth Royte was
struggling to print the second chapter of her book on her husband's printer
(printing and faxing can be especially difficult using Xy) when I called to
talk. Still, she said, she was steadfast: "I'm a person who believes that the
old ways are the best ways. There's no need for anything else."
Indeed, if the XyWriters resemble any other sect, it's the
Shakers (except, of course, for that celibacy thing) in that they prize
utilitarian simplicity above all else. Wilkinson, who is on the verge of
conceding defeat and switching to Word because the local Kinko's will no longer
convert his 5-inch floppies to the 3.5-inch disks the rest of the world has been
using for half a decade, sums up his devotion thusly: "It works. It moves
sentences around." With their customized keyboards and fierce anti-mouse bias,
the XyWriters see themselves as stalwart holdouts against the increasing
corporate grayness of the computerized world. Royte's husband, Peter Kreutzer,
was a user for almost eight years. "I loved the fact that it was customizable,"
he says, though he concedes there were periods when he spent "as much time
configuring my keyboard as writing. It was a sad day giving it up. I realized I
was homogenizing myself. It made all the practical sense in the world, but I
didn't want to do it," he says.
I, too, gave XyWrite up. In my case, it was
sometime during a computer upgrade, when I just couldn't be bothered to load it
once again (more importantly for the XyWriters, Dyson and her colleagues at
EDventures recently abandoned the program as well). And yet, when I began
talking to the faithful, I started to feel the pull of what New York writer Ray
Tennenbaum calls "the Aristotelian elegance" of the program -- that moment when
"you're running it as a full-screen DOS session and it's nothing but you, the
keyboard and a black screen with a little command line at the top -- like
Courier on 8 1/2 -by-11 paper, plain and all's you need."
"Come back, come back," Tennenbaum called softly over the
phone, like a shepherd coaxing a lost member of the flock. I confess I was
sorely tempted. After I hung up, I even dug through my boxes of old disks,
looking for my master copy of XyWrite. Soon, I held the 5-inch
floppy in my hand like the Holy Grail. And I longed to throw off the ornate
trappings of Word -- menus, mouse, toolbar, feh! -- and get back to the
essentials.
Then I remembered that my computer doesn't have a 5-inch
drive. The piece of plastic I was holding was like some holy relic from a lost
sect, useless, its meaning unrecoverable. Paradise lost, indeed.
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