XyWrite

» see xywrite.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

xywrite was finished before i typed my first line of anything. it stopped mattering in 1993, five years before i had a modem, and it was never sold anywhere near me. i recognize the shape of it anyway, because i have spent a working life around editors built on the same principle, where the screen shows you the text and nothing else and everything you want to do is a command you type rather than a menu you go hunting for.

dave erickson and john hild founded xyquest in june 1982 in massachusetts. both of them came out of atex, which built the mainframe typesetting systems newspapers actually ran on, and xywrite was an attempt to fit that idea onto a personal computer. it shipped in september 1982.

the design decision that mattered was refusing to draw anything at all. no fonts on screen and no page layout of any kind. formatting lived in the text as visible codes you could see and edit, and instructions went into a line at the bottom of the window. it was written in assembly, which in 1982 meant it answered a keystroke before you had finished pressing it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ why newsrooms loved it ~

a reporter on deadline does not want to look at the page. they want words to appear at the speed they are being thought, and they want to bend the software around their own habits rather than the other way around. xywrite did both. it was programmable to a degree that would be unusual even now, and people built enormous personal command files that turned it into a machine only they could drive.

the new york times ran on it from 1989 to 1993. that is the peak of the entire story. a word processor that showed no formatting at all, running the biggest newsroom in the united states because it was faster.

~ the ibm deal ~

in june 1990 xyquest signed with ibm to produce a version carrying common user access menus and a graphical interface with mouse support. it was to be called signature and had been announced the previous september. the money was real and so was the distribution, and it should have been the moment the product crossed over into the business market.

then ibm announced a strategic decision to withdraw completely from desktop software. the partnership was abandoned and signature was left in limbo, having eaten the development years in which xyquest should have been building its own windows version. by the time xywrite for windows shipped in august 1993, word for windows already owned the market and there was no argument left to have.

xyquest ran out of money before that release even landed and sold to the technology group in late 1992. the last dos version was 4.18 in 1993. the last windows version was 4.13.

~ what came after ~

the technology group kept selling and supporting it into the 2000s and was dissolved in 2003, which is the formal end of the story. the real end is 1993, when the times walked away and the rest of the newsrooms followed. everything after that was a decade of paperwork.

what survives is not a file format but an argument. xywrite's claim was that a writing tool should be invisible and instant, and that every graphical convenience added on top was standing between the writer and the sentence. that position lost completely in 1993 and has been quietly winning ever since, in every editor that opens to a blank screen with a command line waiting at the bottom of it.

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