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T A B L E__T A L K Is the Web still an all-white ghetto? Discuss race and the Internet in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk
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R E C E N T L Y
Revolt of the couch potatoes The 21st Challenge No. 12 Results Suicide watch on the Net Wired: The book A bug too far
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t h e-----X y-----f i l e s
FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD, XYWRITE IS HISTORY -- BY AMY VIRSHUP | 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 Well, she said, she hardly felt out-of-date, since most of her publishing-world friends were still using XyWrite.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." N E X T_ P A G E .|. The world has moved on, but the XyWriters keep faith |
