XyWrite!

One of my relatives was what he called "a newsman" for a career spanning decades.  I have written about him before, recounting his adventures as a draftee army clerk in Viet Nam -- no Rambo he! -- where he got his start in journalism writing for a division newspaper, his only qualification being that he could type.

Anyway, after he retired he wanted to convert all his notes and article files from the obsolete format they were originally composed in to a modern word processor and I helped him with that, giving me a chance to listen to his stories of the long, long ago, which I absorbed with intense interest.

Anyway the second, the format his copy was originally written in was Xywrite.  I quote from Wikipedia: "XyWrite is a word processor for MS-DOS and Windows modeled on the mainframe-based ATEX typesetting system. Popular with writers and editors for its speed and degree of customization, XyWrite was in its heyday [1989~93] the house word processor in many editorial offices." 
After he passed away, I inherited a lot of his stuff that nobody else wanted and was headed for the dumpster.  This included his old boxes of notes, the original Xywrite floppy disks, big ones and small ones, and the converted files he and I had worked on, saved on thumb drives.  It pained me to see how little any of his close family cared for his life's work and as I picked through the remnants of his career I couldn't help hearing his voice in my head telling me of his early days as a police beat reporter covering bank robberies, warehouse heists and car chases, jewelry store shootouts....  Then on to politics and business as he matured in his profession.

Anyway the third, among things I found was this Xywrite instruction manual. It's no mere pamphlet but about 300 pages -- no lie!  It looks practically new but it has post-it notes scattered through it, and some lines of instruction highlighted here and there.  It looks like he needed to know how to do a certain few thing and a lot of the rest didn't concern him, so when he couldn't figure out how to do one of those things he would look it up in the manual, a case of, "When all else fails, read the instructions," I guess.

Anyway the fourth, I got a kind of uncanny feeling looking up what he had once looked up all those years ago, reading his margin notes, noting a 30-year-old coffee stain splotching a page, some cookie crumbs of the same vintage.  I felt as if he were right beside me looking at the pages with me, recalling how he figured out this newfangled computer stuff.  "Why can't I just use my old Royal Standard and hand in the copy like before?" I could almost hear him wondering.  And I wondered why his own children didn't have any interest in experiencing this one last opportunity to be close to him, to get a sense of his life before it all dissolved into the ever-receding past.