RE: A radical idea: a new XyWrite

[Philip White pdwhite@xxxxxxxx]

EBCDIC? My god! I haven't heard about that one in decades. It was the character set invented and used on the original IBM ‘mainframe’ machines that used 80 column punch cards. You could actually
read a punch card by reading down the columns.
 
(The old joke was that the original IBM PC used EBCDIC internally. – Thankfully, it wasn’t true.)
 
To answer your original question, the Atex editor was actually a stand-alone operating system. It was written on and for the DEC PDP-11 family which (thankfully) used the ASCII character set.
 
The PDP-11 was a very advanced computer for its day. It had a very logical and versatile instruction set and a great CPU. I loved writing code for it.
 
The original and subsequent Intel processors all have very cluttered architecture and instruction sets, that were mainly intended for programming by higher-level instruction languages. Their only redeeming feature is that they have retained
 compatibility with their older instruction sets and so are (probably) still capable of running older program code.


Sent from Mail for Windows 10
 


From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx  on behalf of Kari Eveli 

Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2018 11:02:47 AM

To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx

Subject: Re: A radical idea: a new XyWrite
 



Phil,



No, absolutely not. Original file formats (both Xy3 and Xy4) are very

important, but it remains to be seen what kind of file format would be

appropriate nowadays. My idea would be open up the file format for

customization by the expert user (with standard formats that could be

augmented/overridden by personal add-ons).



Encoding support should, however, be modernized to encompass Unicode.



Did the Atex system use some form of EBCDIC? I do not know. EBCDIC is an

8-bit encoding. As I have not seen the source, it is difficult to say

how data is actually manipulated.



Best regards,



Kari Eveli

LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)

lexitec@xxxxxxxx



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> Hmmm. Am I getting the message that the original scripting format put

> out by XyWrite is no longer relevant?

>

> What about the /internal/ file format? If memory serves, that had

> ‘special’ properties due to an extended number of bits for each character.

>