Xerox NoteCards on Mac?

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Subject: Xerox NoteCards on Mac?
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Date: Fri, 25-Jan-85 18:51:55 EST
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Posted: Fri Jan 25 18:51:55 1985
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From: Mark Zimmerman

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