5 ms·

Agenda: a personal information manager (1990) [pdf]

74 points by hggh 2y ago

cratermoon 2y ago
Lotus Agenda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda
- benfortuna 2y ago
  > Its flexibility proved to be its weakness. New users confronted with so much flexibility were often overpowered by the steep learning curve required to use the program. I wonder if Notion may suffer a similar fate?
  - thomascountz 2y ago
    Sounds similar to trying out emacs/org-mode for the first time. I think such flexible programs do well with the help of crowdsourced/community-based conventions; Notion templates, YouTube videos of Obsidian vault tours, and blogs about org-mode workflows and use cases, for example.
    - jgalt212 2y ago
      be careful here. you may end up spending too much time organizing your notes, and too little time getting things done.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        In general, for me at any rate, having some simple even handwritten to do lists and some basic calendaring get me 90% of the way there. I was just never able to get into any of the systems out there like daytimers and getting things done. I had a work colleague who religiously used a Palm Pilot to track to do items… which was invariably a lengthy list of overdue items.
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    These things are great for academics or professionals in certain fields. They need ways to organize, reference, and write (or otherwise create) from a large corpus of knowledge and experience notes. They are motivated to learn to use these tools because that's they only way to manage their work. The average person just doesn't deal with enough stuff to make it worth their while, even if they can figure it out. They may be perfectly capable of using it, but find it's too much for their needs. A person writing letters and short stories wouldn't use a desktop publishing package, it just doesn't fit their needs. Most people are content with editing their photos with simple tools rather than working with Photoshop.
walterbell 2y ago
A pioneering DOS PIM succeeded by Ecco Pro for Windows and a spectacular resurrection flameout, via Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF Chandler). You can still download and run Agenda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862343 Thanks to Roam Research, we now have Bear Notes, Obsidian, Logseq et al for bi-directional linking, https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals OSS Wildland was promising, but seems to have entered Rust rewrite limbo, https://wildland.io/2023/01/16/WL2023.html https://wildland.io/2023/01/16/WL2023.html And of course, Emacs Org Mode.
hgyjnbdet 2y ago
I'm still using iCal and vCard for this, by way of simple open source apps on mobile and desktop synced by WebDAV. Even use them for tasks/todos and notes (vjournal). Always amazes me people are still rolling their own versions of these standards, the problem was solved years ago.
- steve1977 2y ago
  But there’s no vendor lock-in with open standards…
  - hgyjnbdet 2y ago
    There is that.
  - nicklecompte 2y ago
    Am I misunderstanding what "open standard" means? Why don't vCard and iCalendar count?
    - steve1977 2y ago
      I was being sarcastic. vCard and iCal are open standards - and that is probably why there are not used by many. Because many vendors like vendor lock-in.
      - nicklecompte 2y ago
        Got it - thought you were saying vendor lock-in meant the standards were de facto not open (which seemed unfair, the standards are transparent and not unusually difficult to implement).
harha 2y ago
Always interesting to see how these small screens can display a relatively large amount of information so nicely.
pixelesque 2y ago
There was such an explosion of PIMs and PDAs in the 90s I seem to remember... My Dad went through loads of different bits of software (paid for by work)... I can remember Ecco, Sidekick, Packrat as names, and I'm sure there were more that were more closely tied to PDAs like Psion and Palm in the later 90s...
ljsocal 2y ago
I was an early and long-time Lotus user. It was the first app that made me feel like these personal computers really can make a dramatic productivity boost. I had enough interaction with the team at Lotus in Boston that they gave me a peek at screenshots of the Windows version. (Code-named “Hobbs” as in Calvin and.). There never was a good replacement for Lotus so it was painful when I had to accomplish the same work working across multiple apps.
jbillington 2y ago
What is the state of the art in this category today? Apple notes? Outlook?
- walterbell 2y ago
  Notes: Obsidian, Logseq and other markdown clones of Roam Research ($165/yr, DevonThink (native iOS/macOS non-sub), Bear Notes ($20/yr). Notes + Calendar: OmniFocus, 2DoApp (native iOS/macOS non-sub). https://old.reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/o57g7o/obsidian_v_bear_help_me_choose/ https://old.reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/o57g7o/obsidian_v_... > DEVONthink is superb for non-markdown files (it’s decent at Markdown too) .. One plus to Obsidian is it’s all Markdown files so while not every feature will work in other editors you can mix and match with iA, nvUltra, DEVONthink, Typora, Taio, etc. it’s something that isn’t an option with Bear or Craft as proprietary SQLite and JSON formats respectively, both have great export options though.. Obsidian to me feels a bit like a jailbroken iOS device with too many Cydia system tweaks installed. It's great fun, and endless exploration of cool features, but stuff breaks and starts feeling clunky.
rayiner 2y ago
These retrospectives make me upset about the software industry today. The PIM software today isn’t any better than it was 20-30 years ago, and in many respects it’s worse. Electron-based trash that doesn’t do half of what Lotus or even Outlook did years ago. (Quite literally—the new web based trash version of Outlook has blank spots in the user interface for missing features that were in the old version.) We are living in “Idiocracy” and don’t even realize it.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Alarmingly, 1990 is 34 years ago. Though I still think of it as 20-30 as well.
  - canadiantim 2y ago
    I still think of 1990 as 10 years ago and refuse to believe otherwise
- Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
  I never used Outlook back in the day. But indeed, now that I'm forced to use the web version, I find it hard to believe that they are pushing such trash on so many millions of users. How can it lack such basic things as properly quoting the message you're replying to (be it with > symbols, a vertical line or whatever) or knowing what email address an incoming message is actually directed to (this can be achieved by going deep into the menus to show the raw email text, but come on). All those things were common when I started using email, maybe around 25 years ago. They shouldn't be rocket sience. And anyway, it's still not as annoying as that steaming pile of trash called Teams... it's sad how low Microsoft's QA has fallen.
  - mikestew 2y ago
    it's sad how low Microsoft's QA has fallen. Microsoft famously got rid of their QA teams, what, ten or fifteen years ago? Not that you’d notice…
  - rayiner 2y ago
refset 2y ago
While trying to recall the relationship between Lotus Notes and Lotus Agenda ("which came first?" etc.) I just dug up this[0] comment from a different Notes-related HN discussion a few months ago that also mentions 'Chandler'[1] - an OSS implementation written in Python: > [Chandler] is inspired by a PIM from the 1980s called Lotus Agenda, notable because of its "free-form" approach to information management. Lead developer of Agenda, Mitch Kapor, was also involved in the vision and management of Chandler. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39070631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39070631 / "For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)
- walterbell 2y ago
  The millions invested in P2P OSAF/Chandler indirectly shipped a great book :) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-picture/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-picture/ & https://www.chandlerproject.org/screenshots/ https://www.chandlerproject.org/screenshots/ There was also the Groove Networks desktop client from Ray Ozzie, a Chandler-esque P2P successor to Lotus Notes, acquired by Microsoft, https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-buys-ray-ozzie-talko/ https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-buys-ray-ozzie-talk... & https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/22104480/crn-interview-ray-ozzie-groove-networks https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/22104480/crn-interv... > Groove File Sharing.. projects the concept of sharing and synchronization and conversation directly into Windows Explorer so every Windows folder now has a Groove button in it and if you press it, you turn that folder into a workspace that shares that folder with other people inside or outside the company, puts red marks on files, lets you have chats and conversations privately within that folder, it projects all the platform capabilities of Groove right into the file system. It lets people share folders across all their computers, whether at home or at work..
  - atombender 2y ago
    I remember doing realtime collaboration in Groove in the early 2000s, and it was magical — this was doing what Google Docs, Figma etc. only accomplished much, much later. Unfortunately, Groove was also obviously too much of a toy app back then. The whiteboard app was too simple, the word processor was too simple, and so on. It was an office suite but it could do almost nothing. The vision was extremely impressive, but the apps never evolved to compete with real office apps. Another product that was way ahead of its time and failed in spite of it, or because of it.
walterbell 2y ago
Open-source Treesheets on Win/Linux/Mac combines a spreadsheet and outliner. Fast 2-D UX from the creator of a 3-D game engine, https://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/screenshots.html https://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/screenshots.html & https://hn.algolia.com/?query=treesheets https://hn.algolia.com/?query=treesheets & https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets 1990's doogiePIM for Win continues to receive regular updates from an indie developer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120483 & https://bitespire.com https://bitespire.com. $135 perpetual license or $7/mo sub, with 1990s copywriting. > doogiePIM is a sophisticated, encryption-enhanced personal information manager, uniquely tailored not merely for securing your data within the sanctuary of local storage but for enriching and preserving the fertile grounds of your creative and intellectual pursuits. Envision it as an Artist's Palette or a Scholar's Codex, where the essence of creativity and knowledge coalesce.
- no_identd 2y ago
  Can it implement {MYN & GTD}?
  - walterbell 2y ago
    They have a KB article on GTD: https://help.bitespire.com/portal/en/kb/articles/harnessing-doogie-pim-for-getting-things-done https://help.bitespire.com/portal/en/kb/articles/harnessing-...

74 points by hggh 2y ago

cratermoon 2y ago

Lotus Agenda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda

benfortuna 2y ago
> Its flexibility proved to be its weakness. New users confronted with so much flexibility were often overpowered by the steep learning curve required to use the program. I wonder if Notion may suffer a similar fate?
- thomascountz 2y ago
  Sounds similar to trying out emacs/org-mode for the first time. I think such flexible programs do well with the help of crowdsourced/community-based conventions; Notion templates, YouTube videos of Obsidian vault tours, and blogs about org-mode workflows and use cases, for example.
  - jgalt212 2y ago
    be careful here. you may end up spending too much time organizing your notes, and too little time getting things done.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      In general, for me at any rate, having some simple even handwritten to do lists and some basic calendaring get me 90% of the way there. I was just never able to get into any of the systems out there like daytimers and getting things done. I had a work colleague who religiously used a Palm Pilot to track to do items… which was invariably a lengthy list of overdue items.
- cratermoon 2y ago
  These things are great for academics or professionals in certain fields. They need ways to organize, reference, and write (or otherwise create) from a large corpus of knowledge and experience notes. They are motivated to learn to use these tools because that's they only way to manage their work. The average person just doesn't deal with enough stuff to make it worth their while, even if they can figure it out. They may be perfectly capable of using it, but find it's too much for their needs. A person writing letters and short stories wouldn't use a desktop publishing package, it just doesn't fit their needs. Most people are content with editing their photos with simple tools rather than working with Photoshop.

walterbell 2y ago

A pioneering DOS PIM succeeded by Ecco Pro for Windows and a spectacular resurrection flameout, via Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF Chandler). You can still download and run Agenda, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862343 Thanks to Roam Research, we now have Bear Notes, Obsidian, Logseq et al for bi-directional linking, https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals OSS Wildland was promising, but seems to have entered Rust rewrite limbo, https://wildland.io/2023/01/16/WL2023.html https://wildland.io/2023/01/16/WL2023.html And of course, Emacs Org Mode.

hgyjnbdet 2y ago

I'm still using iCal and vCard for this, by way of simple open source apps on mobile and desktop synced by WebDAV. Even use them for tasks/todos and notes (vjournal). Always amazes me people are still rolling their own versions of these standards, the problem was solved years ago.

steve1977 2y ago
But there’s no vendor lock-in with open standards…
- hgyjnbdet 2y ago
  There is that.
- nicklecompte 2y ago
  Am I misunderstanding what "open standard" means? Why don't vCard and iCalendar count?
  - steve1977 2y ago
    I was being sarcastic. vCard and iCal are open standards - and that is probably why there are not used by many. Because many vendors like vendor lock-in.
    - nicklecompte 2y ago
      Got it - thought you were saying vendor lock-in meant the standards were de facto not open (which seemed unfair, the standards are transparent and not unusually difficult to implement).

harha 2y ago

Always interesting to see how these small screens can display a relatively large amount of information so nicely.

pixelesque 2y ago

There was such an explosion of PIMs and PDAs in the 90s I seem to remember... My Dad went through loads of different bits of software (paid for by work)... I can remember Ecco, Sidekick, Packrat as names, and I'm sure there were more that were more closely tied to PDAs like Psion and Palm in the later 90s...

ljsocal 2y ago

I was an early and long-time Lotus user. It was the first app that made me feel like these personal computers really can make a dramatic productivity boost. I had enough interaction with the team at Lotus in Boston that they gave me a peek at screenshots of the Windows version. (Code-named “Hobbs” as in Calvin and.). There never was a good replacement for Lotus so it was painful when I had to accomplish the same work working across multiple apps.

jbillington 2y ago

What is the state of the art in this category today? Apple notes? Outlook?

walterbell 2y ago
Notes: Obsidian, Logseq and other markdown clones of Roam Research ($165/yr, DevonThink (native iOS/macOS non-sub), Bear Notes ($20/yr). Notes + Calendar: OmniFocus, 2DoApp (native iOS/macOS non-sub). https://old.reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/o57g7o/obsidian_v_bear_help_me_choose/ https://old.reddit.com/r/bearapp/comments/o57g7o/obsidian_v_... > DEVONthink is superb for non-markdown files (it’s decent at Markdown too) .. One plus to Obsidian is it’s all Markdown files so while not every feature will work in other editors you can mix and match with iA, nvUltra, DEVONthink, Typora, Taio, etc. it’s something that isn’t an option with Bear or Craft as proprietary SQLite and JSON formats respectively, both have great export options though.. Obsidian to me feels a bit like a jailbroken iOS device with too many Cydia system tweaks installed. It's great fun, and endless exploration of cool features, but stuff breaks and starts feeling clunky.

rayiner 2y ago

These retrospectives make me upset about the software industry today. The PIM software today isn’t any better than it was 20-30 years ago, and in many respects it’s worse. Electron-based trash that doesn’t do half of what Lotus or even Outlook did years ago. (Quite literally—the new web based trash version of Outlook has blank spots in the user interface for missing features that were in the old version.) We are living in “Idiocracy” and don’t even realize it.

jvanderbot 2y ago
Alarmingly, 1990 is 34 years ago. Though I still think of it as 20-30 as well.
- canadiantim 2y ago
  I still think of 1990 as 10 years ago and refuse to believe otherwise
Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
I never used Outlook back in the day. But indeed, now that I'm forced to use the web version, I find it hard to believe that they are pushing such trash on so many millions of users. How can it lack such basic things as properly quoting the message you're replying to (be it with > symbols, a vertical line or whatever) or knowing what email address an incoming message is actually directed to (this can be achieved by going deep into the menus to show the raw email text, but come on). All those things were common when I started using email, maybe around 25 years ago. They shouldn't be rocket sience. And anyway, it's still not as annoying as that steaming pile of trash called Teams... it's sad how low Microsoft's QA has fallen.
- mikestew 2y ago
  it's sad how low Microsoft's QA has fallen. Microsoft famously got rid of their QA teams, what, ten or fifteen years ago? Not that you’d notice…
- rayiner 2y ago

refset 2y ago

While trying to recall the relationship between Lotus Notes and Lotus Agenda ("which came first?" etc.) I just dug up this[0] comment from a different Notes-related HN discussion a few months ago that also mentions 'Chandler'[1] - an OSS implementation written in Python: > [Chandler] is inspired by a PIM from the 1980s called Lotus Agenda, notable because of its "free-form" approach to information management. Lead developer of Agenda, Mitch Kapor, was also involved in the vision and management of Chandler. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39070631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39070631 / "For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)

walterbell 2y ago
The millions invested in P2P OSAF/Chandler indirectly shipped a great book :) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-picture/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-picture/ & https://www.chandlerproject.org/screenshots/ https://www.chandlerproject.org/screenshots/ There was also the Groove Networks desktop client from Ray Ozzie, a Chandler-esque P2P successor to Lotus Notes, acquired by Microsoft, https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-buys-ray-ozzie-talko/ https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-buys-ray-ozzie-talk... & https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/22104480/crn-interview-ray-ozzie-groove-networks https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/22104480/crn-interv... > Groove File Sharing.. projects the concept of sharing and synchronization and conversation directly into Windows Explorer so every Windows folder now has a Groove button in it and if you press it, you turn that folder into a workspace that shares that folder with other people inside or outside the company, puts red marks on files, lets you have chats and conversations privately within that folder, it projects all the platform capabilities of Groove right into the file system. It lets people share folders across all their computers, whether at home or at work..
- atombender 2y ago
  I remember doing realtime collaboration in Groove in the early 2000s, and it was magical — this was doing what Google Docs, Figma etc. only accomplished much, much later. Unfortunately, Groove was also obviously too much of a toy app back then. The whiteboard app was too simple, the word processor was too simple, and so on. It was an office suite but it could do almost nothing. The vision was extremely impressive, but the apps never evolved to compete with real office apps. Another product that was way ahead of its time and failed in spite of it, or because of it.

walterbell 2y ago

Open-source Treesheets on Win/Linux/Mac combines a spreadsheet and outliner. Fast 2-D UX from the creator of a 3-D game engine, https://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/screenshots.html https://strlen.com/treesheets/docs/screenshots.html & https://hn.algolia.com/?query=treesheets https://hn.algolia.com/?query=treesheets & https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets 1990's doogiePIM for Win continues to receive regular updates from an indie developer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120483 & https://bitespire.com https://bitespire.com. $135 perpetual license or $7/mo sub, with 1990s copywriting. > doogiePIM is a sophisticated, encryption-enhanced personal information manager, uniquely tailored not merely for securing your data within the sanctuary of local storage but for enriching and preserving the fertile grounds of your creative and intellectual pursuits. Envision it as an Artist's Palette or a Scholar's Codex, where the essence of creativity and knowledge coalesce.

no_identd 2y ago
Can it implement {MYN & GTD}?
- walterbell 2y ago
  They have a KB article on GTD: https://help.bitespire.com/portal/en/kb/articles/harnessing-doogie-pim-for-getting-things-done https://help.bitespire.com/portal/en/kb/articles/harnessing-...