Re: Xy Manuals Online (Was undocumented define functions)

[R Tennenbaum]

On Sun, 23 Feb 1997 Peter Evans wrote:

>Always happy to presume upon the generosity and efforts of others--as when
>I suggest that TTG should give XyWrite away--I wish there were a XyWrite
>FAQ. Certainly I've got lots of questions that aren't pressing or the
>slightest bit topical, and that I'm sure have been answered somewhere in
>the archives (which I lack the stomach to wade through). For example, who
>did most of the work writing XyWrite, and where are they now? Was XyQuest
>unable to extract a large wodge of money from IBM to compensate for (what
>seemed to me, a mere user, as) IBM's massive time-wasting? Did anyone
>outside the computer press get his or her paws on pre-IBM XyWrite 4, and if
>so, was it any good? Was it only us in Tokyo who instantly dubbed the
>unusable product in the IBM box "Pigmanure"?

You're not alone; one of the first questions I asked when I got on
this list a year or two ago was about what exactly happened when IBM
took XyQuest under its wing. Maybe nobody knows. All I know is
people hated Signature and a lot of bad feeling held for far longer
than it really should have.

From the OS/2 side of things: there is to this day a need for XY/OS2.
 Without taxing the non-OS/2ers here -- there are lots and lots of
text editors for OS/2 but none suit it quite so superbly as an OS/2
port of Xy would. Even if someone could only kludge Xy to handle
long filenames, it would do a great deal to bolster the bridge that
seems to have connected OS/2 and Unix.

It's doubtful that Xy could have "saved" OS/2, and yet it could be
argued that the unhappy scenario fortold the "failure" of OS/2.
We'll beg the question of whether OS/2 is dead, or if it is dead how
could it conceivably have failed under the circumstances.

Xy is of course peculiarly (and almost in spite of itself) suited for
use as a programmer's editor, and any Xy-OS/2 user who's found
himself hesitating between epm and e knows precisely how Xy might
have been fashioned into the quick-and-clean solution.

I think you are suggesting that a database for this fine listserv
could alleviate some of its snottiness, but personally at the moment
my Perl is nonexistent.

RT