5 ms·

Xerox PARC's NoteCards in a Nutshell (1987) [pdf]

77 points by mepian 3y ago

la4ry 3y ago
you can run it now: https://notecards.online https://notecards.online
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Hm, cool, but tried and doesn't seem to be working in Firefox.
  - mepian 3y ago
    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.
warning26 3y ago
Would love to see these concepts revived in a modern native note-taking app! Anyone know of anything similar?
- stinkytaco 3y ago
  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.
  - FullyFunctional 3y ago
    "roam" isn't easy to search for. Do you have a link. Does org-mode have the graphical map like NoteCards?
    - entrepy123 3y ago
      That Roam link would be https://roamresearch.com https://roamresearch.com.
AlbertCory 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  Expanding on that topic: * Supporting Collaboration in NoteCards https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/637069.637089 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&doi=0da85a228dc8fe9525c2454d2a36487d634dfaf9 https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
gdubs 3y ago
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!
- timmg 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.”
    - philipswood 3y ago
      "pink plane" (vs. "blue plane") Is about incremental improvement vs. paradigm shift. From: > There are two orthogonal forces at work in the Squeak team, with which we have been able to make two kinds of progress. These have most recently been articulated in Alan Kay's allusion to Arthur Koestler's metaphor of progress in two planes: the incremental improvement plane (which Alan calls the "pink" plane) and the paradigm shift (or "blue") plane. ("The Act of Creation", Arthur Koestler, 1964, Arkana Reissue Edition, Paperback, ISBN: 0140191917) Via: [C2 wiki](https://wiki.c2.com/?BluePlane https://wiki.c2.com/?BluePlane) And [Archived Squeak page](http://web.archive.org/web/20050406063507/http://squeak.org/about/headed-prev-vers.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050406063507/http://squeak.org/...)
GnarfGnarf 3y ago
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.
tabtab 3y ago
Ah Nostalgia. Makes me miss the simplicity of WYSIWYG tools. These "responsive" auto-format CSS/DOM driven things are turning me grey, requiring whack-a-mole tuning & debugging. Most our users are not even using mobile, such that most that complexity is WASTED. I don't know who or what it's "responsive" to, but it's not my code. Must it be convoluted? Geezer thing? I dunno. I wanna git on the WYSIWYG lawn, where is it!
philipswood 3y ago
If you added an access log* and display timing to something like this it would be able to drive spaced repetition learning. * With a suitable permission model of course. Maybe the content could be hosted elsewhere, but the access and scheduling info could run locally.

77 points by mepian 3y ago

la4ry 3y ago

you can run it now: https://notecards.online https://notecards.online

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Hm, cool, but tried and doesn't seem to be working in Firefox.
- mepian 3y ago
  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.

warning26 3y ago

Would love to see these concepts revived in a modern native note-taking app! Anyone know of anything similar?

stinkytaco 3y ago
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.
- FullyFunctional 3y ago
  "roam" isn't easy to search for. Do you have a link. Does org-mode have the graphical map like NoteCards?
  - entrepy123 3y ago
    That Roam link would be https://roamresearch.com https://roamresearch.com.

AlbertCory 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
Expanding on that topic: * Supporting Collaboration in NoteCards https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/637069.637089 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&doi=0da85a228dc8fe9525c2454d2a36487d634dfaf9 https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

gdubs 3y ago

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!

timmg 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.”
  - philipswood 3y ago
    "pink plane" (vs. "blue plane") Is about incremental improvement vs. paradigm shift. From: > There are two orthogonal forces at work in the Squeak team, with which we have been able to make two kinds of progress. These have most recently been articulated in Alan Kay's allusion to Arthur Koestler's metaphor of progress in two planes: the incremental improvement plane (which Alan calls the "pink" plane) and the paradigm shift (or "blue") plane. ("The Act of Creation", Arthur Koestler, 1964, Arkana Reissue Edition, Paperback, ISBN: 0140191917) Via: [C2 wiki](https://wiki.c2.com/?BluePlane https://wiki.c2.com/?BluePlane) And [Archived Squeak page](http://web.archive.org/web/20050406063507/http://squeak.org/about/headed-prev-vers.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050406063507/http://squeak.org/...)

GnarfGnarf 3y ago

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.

tabtab 3y ago

Ah Nostalgia. Makes me miss the simplicity of WYSIWYG tools. These "responsive" auto-format CSS/DOM driven things are turning me grey, requiring whack-a-mole tuning & debugging. Most our users are not even using mobile, such that most that complexity is WASTED. I don't know who or what it's "responsive" to, but it's not my code. Must it be convoluted? Geezer thing? I dunno. I wanna git on the WYSIWYG lawn, where is it!

philipswood 3y ago

If you added an access log* and display timing to something like this it would be able to drive spaced repetition learning. * With a suitable permission model of course. Maybe the content could be hosted elsewhere, but the access and scheduling info could run locally.