[HN Gopher] Xerox PARC's NoteCards in a Nutshell (1987) [pdf]
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Xerox PARC's NoteCards in a Nutshell (1987) [pdf]
Author : mepian
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-06-27 15:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| warning26 wrote:
| Would love to see these concepts revived in a modern native note-
| taking app! Anyone know of anything similar?
| stinkytaco wrote:
| Fairly similar to roam. It has:
|
| Atomic nodes.
|
| Citations.
|
| A map of linked nodes.
|
| Tiddlywiki and org-mode can also offer similar experiences I'd
| you take the time to set them up.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > One of the biggest limitations of NoteCards is the lack of
| support for collaborative work. Our experience suggests that most
| idea processing tasks are inherently collaborative, with groups
| of varying from two to ten people working in a single area or on
| a single project. Moreover, collaboration frequently involves
| sharing a common information space (e.g., a NoteFile).
| Unfortunately, NoteCards does not adequately support NoteFile
| sharing
|
| Even for the time, that was a pretty serious omission.
| "GroupWare" was already a thriving topic then.
| lispm wrote:
| Expanding on that topic:
|
| * Supporting Collaboration in NoteCards
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/637069.637089
|
| * Reflections on NoteCards: Seven issues for the next
| generation of hypermedia systems
|
| https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
| la4ry wrote:
| you can run it now: https://notecards.online
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Hm, cool, but tried and doesn't seem to be working in Firefox.
| mepian wrote:
| Worked fine for me in Firefox 114.0.2 earlier today. The page
| runs a VNC session to an emulation server with a fairly low
| number of available sessions, so it's probably simply busy.
| gdubs wrote:
| I'm moved by how flexible and creative some of the early
| computing paradigms were compared to where we ended up. It feels
| like for all the processing power and advances, people really got
| locked into some 'standard' ways of interacting and organizing
| information, and we lost the creative joy that was present in
| places like early Xerox PARC, etc.
|
| This is why I love stuff like this - there's a wealth of old
| ideas, tree branches we never went down. So much of the SAAS
| websites, etc, you see today feel so clunky in comparison.
|
| More of this!
| linguae wrote:
| I'm also nostalgic for the early days of personal computing,
| back then there was more experimentation and when there was a
| greater sense of wonder about the possibilities. While I feel
| there are still a lot of exciting advances in other areas of
| computing such as artificial intelligence, I feel that
| innovation in the realm of personal computing has stagnated.
| Moreover, since the rise of Web 2.0 and smartphones, personal
| computing has been the target of aggressive monetization
| schemes and UI/UX trends that, in my opinion, have degraded the
| computing experience compared to the pre-Web 2.0/smartphone
| era. Of course, I don't want to look at the past with rose-
| colored glasses; while I'm nostalgic for Windows 95/98/NT/2000,
| I also feel Microsoft's monopolistic actions in the 1980s and
| 1990s and the crushing of competitors played a major role in
| shaping today's situation.
|
| If I were a billionaire, I'd start an R&D group that is
| dedicated to improving the personal computing experience,
| producing an open source system.
| timmg wrote:
| Do you think any of that is because they hadn't paid the pain
| of failing to scale? I probably spend way too much time
| thinking about how things I build will work when I get to the
| "limits" of how much data I will store.
|
| (I'm not suggesting that's the case. Just asking.)
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Personally, I do not. I think it was because they had some
| solid high level design principles in mind. Go read Dan
| Ingalls Back to the Future on the Design Principles of
| Smalltalk, or the original Byte 81 magazine. I've moved on,
| and do languages like Swift, Kotlin, and Python. I've read in
| detail some of the PEP evolutions as well as design
| discussions for Swift and Kotlin. They're clearly very smart
| people. Every bit as smart as Ingalls, Kay, and crowd, but
| their goals seem so very "pink plane."
| lars-b2018 wrote:
| I agree with you. And I wonder how the working paradigms and,
| importantly, the tools, got defined as they are. Not a
| criticism, but the tools that won. In the younger days of
| interactive computing, there seemed to be an explosion of
| creativity on how to manipulate, use and present information,
| in systems like these and others. Then continents arose (Lotus
| 123, Excel, Visicalc), (Wordstar, Word, etc), Emacs.. Office
| quantized a lot of domains, I think. It locked us into tools as
| the standard of productivity tools and human computer
| interaction patterns. And, the majority of users use these in
| their productive use of their time.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| Such brilliance, such originality. Buried by a copier-focused
| organization.
|
| Ironic that Xerox published a book called " _The Billions Nobody
| Wanted_ ", about Chester Carlson's long road to inventing
| xerography.
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