I just had a couple of thoughts: 1) I recall hearing, and this could be wrong certainly, but at the time that IBM took Xywrite and made Signature, they took the assembly source and ported that to C. (I was under the impression that someone in the group, at that time, and seen the C source and/or had a copy. I remember thinking that2) Dragonfly Software/Note Bene, the company, I thought had the rights and use of the original Xywrite engine and source, and therefore had control ofverse engineering the executable. (For example, when Compaq came out with the first IBM compatible computer, they were taken to court and had to proveJust some thoughts! Russ -noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: ve sent Ed and Carl the XyWrite2 and XyWrite3 source code for review. I hope he can report his findings and impressions to the group.Also, I have reverse engineered the stub of XyWrite 4.018. I believe many people in this community may not know that XyWrite 4 was built in stages. First, it was built) has now been fully reconstructed. What remains is the overlay, about 275Kbe easier to complete.I will continue the work and share progress.P.S. I will continue to use AI to help generate messages, regardless of how some people feel. What matters is the technical work and the results. I'll let Ed and Carl report back to the group. Best regards,XYGHOST ============================================================================================= PROGRESS METRICS ============================================================================================= Metric Value ----------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- Full file size 681824 (delta=0) [MATCH] Stub size 369568 (orig=369568, delta=0) [MATCH] Header size 0x0C00 (orig=0x0C00) [MATCH] Reloc count 597 (orig=597) [MATCH] MZ header fields 14/14 Reloc OK (pos+tgt) tity 681824/681824 (100%) Load image identity 366496/366496 (100%) Overlay identity 312256/312256 (100%) Active zone opcode identity 17159/17159 (100%) Header diffs 0 bytes Diff regions 0 Longest contiguous match 681824 bytes String match rate ========================================================================================== END OF REPORT==========================================================================================From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of em36 <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, February 27, 2026 5:43 PM To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: About the reverse-engineering thread For better or worse, this thread illustrates something I've noticed elsewhere: Whenever someone spends dozens or hundreds of hours working on something that will benefit many other people, a significant number of people will complain that there is something dishonest or disgraceful about it. I've seen many instances of this, and that is perhaps the case here. I don't care whether an email message seems to have been cleaned up or written by AI. The author may not have the linguistic skills needed to write the message on their own. What matters is the content, and in this case, it seems very likely that the content is both real and valuable. It's impossible (for me at least) to imagine any way it could not be. The culture of mistrust that has manifested itself on this list may now have destroyed the one real chance we have of bringing XyWrite into the twenty-first century. I very much hope that the person who is working on this will have the grace to ignore the mistrust and continue working. and I would certainly hope to hear more about this project. My guess is that I'm not alone in thinking this. Anyone who shares my view - and I hope that the original poster will consider joining in this - is welcome to get in touch with me at edward-dot-mendelson-at-columbia-dot-edu and I'll be glad to share the information with others who get in touch in the same way. But I hope someone else has already taken steps in the right direction, and my offer here is superfluous.