info-mac@uw-beaver (01/26/85)
From: Mark Zimmerman <mex101@mitre> I just saw a demo of Xerox's NoteCards system and want to tell people about it, so we can start working on a version for the Mac! NoteCards is like an extension of the desktop metaphor: your screen has windows on electronic index cards, each of which can contain text, pictures, etc., and links to other cards. Links can be of various types: references/sourcing, argumentation, proof, refutation, consequences, etc. Cards can be filed in boxes, which can contain other boxes, etc. One can display graphically the links between cards, to get an overall view of the information, or zoom in to look at all the gory details when needed. Esther Dyson wrote about NoteCards in the 31 Dec 84 issue of her newsletter, RELease1.0 ... see that for further impressions. Perhaps if there are experts at Xerox PARC or elsewhere listening they can correct/extend my comments. The Mac's TE and windowing should do a fair fraction of the work for a Mac version/analog of NoteCards ... I am dreaming about writing up a first hack at it in MacFORTH. NoteCards is sort of a multidimensional ThinkTank (or rather, ThinkTank is a 1-dimensional shadow of NoteCards) ... it looks likely to be a great tool for gathering/organizing/presenting complicated data. (Besides other features described above, one can ask NoteCards to search along various types of links to find various items, reorganize links, embed pointers to other cards within the text/picture on a card, etc.) Best, Zimmermann at MITRE