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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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THE XY FILES | PAGE 1, 2
By 1992, the company -- which at that point consisted of fewer than 10 people -- was sold to a Baltimore outfit called the Technology Group, which needed a word processor for the "intelligent systems" software it was developing. The Technology Group did come out with one more major upgrade of the product -- a Windows version that many of the faithful still eschew because it has, God forbid, menus. Word achieved market dominance. And that's where the story should end: The world moved on. Well, most of the world. But out there, hidden though they were, the XyWriters, like early Christians, have held on. Technology Group president Kenneth Frank won't give out sales figures, but he says there's still a steady stream of purchases each month (the software now lists for $495, but most people go for the $129 "competitive upgrade"). And though there are users like Pete Wilkinson, a writer for Rolling Stone and other magazines, who still runs his (circa 1986) software on a Leading Edge that may or may not have a hard drive (Wilkinson isn't sure), the majority are, in fact, tech-savvy types running it on Pentiums or even, like devotee Wendell Cochran, a home-built Linux box. About 200 of them have banded together electronically on a listserv maintained by Nathan Sivin, a history of science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. And then there are the power users like Carl Distefano, a New York lawyer who uses XyWrite (insiders shorthand it to Xy for the DOS version, XyW for Windows) as the interface to his operating system (OS/2), to dial his phone and to keep his personal calendar, among other things. Distefano maintains XyWWWeb, a cornucopia of Xy extensions written by him and other power users. "It becomes yours in a way that no other program does," he says, explaining his devotion. "The various commands and gestures become part of your way of thinking." Though the XyWriters mostly deny they're a cult ("we're too cranky and individualistic for that" is the standard line), they in fact bear all the hallmarks of sectdom. They have a gospel: Herb Tyson's "XyWrite Revealed," a programming guide to Version 3. They are plagued by numerous devils: From the Beast in Redmond, whose Word program the XyWriters dismiss as "a typewriter pool program," to the Technology Group, the false messiah that, as one typical XyWriter put it, "care[s] nothing about the hyperloyal users, & [is] narrow-minded, unhelpful, surly, evasive, inconsistent, & untrustworthy." (Kenneth Frank says he's used to the list's vituperation.) And they certainly suffer for their faith: Installing the program requires doing things like first disabling your CD-ROM drive. Nancy Friedman of Banana Republic had so much trouble getting hers to run on her new Pentium that she finally had to downgrade her chip from a 166 to a 133. "It won't install on a fast chip," she says (an assertion others deny). Loading it "took days of hand holding from the Technology Group and consultations with the list," says Friedman. "But you feel like you've climbed Mount Everest when it all pops up." New York writer Elizabeth Royte was struggling to print the second chapter of her book on her husband's printer (printing and faxing can be especially difficult using Xy) when I called to talk. Still, she said, she was steadfast: "I'm a person who believes that the old ways are the best ways. There's no need for anything else." Indeed, if the XyWriters resemble any other sect, it's the Shakers (except, of course, for that celibacy thing) in that they prize utilitarian simplicity above all else. Wilkinson, who is on the verge of conceding defeat and switching to Word because the local Kinko's will no longer convert his 5-inch floppies to the 3.5-inch disks the rest of the world has been using for half a decade, sums up his devotion thusly: "It works. It moves sentences around." With their customized keyboards and fierce anti-mouse bias, the XyWriters see themselves as stalwart holdouts against the increasing corporate grayness of the computerized world. Royte's husband, Peter Kreutzer, was a user for almost eight years. "I loved the fact that it was customizable," he says, though he concedes there were periods when he spent "as much time configuring my keyboard as writing. It was a sad day giving it up. I realized I was homogenizing myself. It made all the practical sense in the world, but I didn't want to do it," he says. I, too, gave XyWrite up. In my case, it was sometime during a computer upgrade, when I just couldn't be bothered to load it once again (more importantly for the XyWriters, Dyson and her colleagues at EDventures recently abandoned the program as well). And yet, when I began talking to the faithful, I started to feel the pull of what New York writer Ray Tennenbaum calls "the Aristotelian elegance" of the program -- that moment when "you're running it as a full-screen DOS session and it's nothing but you, the keyboard and a black screen with a little command line at the top -- like Courier on 8 1/2 -by-11 paper, plain and all's you need." "Come back, come back," Tennenbaum called softly over the phone, like a shepherd coaxing a lost member of the flock. I confess I was sorely tempted. After I hung up, I even dug through my boxes of old disks, looking for my master copy of XyWrite. Soon, I held the 5-inch floppy in my hand like the Holy Grail. And I longed to throw off the ornate trappings of Word -- menus, mouse, toolbar, feh! -- and get back to the essentials. Then I remembered that my computer doesn't have a 5-inch drive. The piece of plastic I was holding was like some holy relic from a lost sect, useless, its meaning unrecoverable. Paradise lost, indeed.
Amy Virshup, a senior editor at SmartMoney, wrote this piece with Microsoft Word. |