Date   : Sun, 03 Aug 1986 16:37:06 GMT
From   : "Willie Smith, LTN Components Eng." <w_smith@wookie.dec.com>
Subject: re: MIX editor

In a previous article, Dick (kodak!gardner) Gardner sang the
praises of the MIX editor ($30 through MIX Software), and I
thought I should give equal time to an opposing view.  I bought
the MIX editor about a year ago and had all sorts of problems
with it.  A quick look at it with a debugger, and the setting
up of a new stack pointer at the beginning of the program helped
some of the more serious (random) crashes, but I still had some
problems with it.  It seemed to crash if you reached the end of
the memory buffer without _manually_ swapping buffers, it took
_forever_ to do a block move, there was no easy way to back up
in large files, and it would occasionally go away at random
times.  I have renamed it to the MIXmaster editor and stuffed
it into a drawer somewhere.  I called the company to tell them
about my partial fix (the stack pointer) and they denied there
was a problem, treated me like an idiot {I may be one, but I
resent the attitude of 'there couldn't be anything wrong with
_our_ software, dummy'}, and made me call their 'technical'
line (my dime) with my bug report.
       Admittedly, this is a (potentially) wonderful program, as
when it was working, it worked really well, I was able to set
it up about halfway between RSX KED and Wordstar, and was very
powerful and extensable.  However, unexplained random crashes
and serious problems with large files made me put it aside and
purchase Wordstar...
       My system is a (primarily) Compupro S-100 machine running
CP/M 2.2N with (at the time) 64K, 6MHz Z-80, no interrupts, and
2 8 inch floppies.
 
Willie Smith
UUCP:  decwrl!wookie.dec.com!smith
Internet:      smith@wookie.dec.com
 
The opinions above are those of myself, and I have no affiliation
(other than that of a customer) of Compupro, MIX Software, or
Digital Research, whose trademarks appear above.