Rediscovering Lotus Agenda (MS-DOS, 1989) | Hacker News Reader

Rediscovering Lotus Agenda (MS-DOS, 1989)

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74 pointstaviso11 comments

The manual sounds great. One of my pet peeves about modern software is how bad documentation standards have gotten. PDF or GNU info works for me, but it seems like most software rarely has a comprehensive (document everything) structured manual. It's a feature that I mostly won't invest any serious time or energy into a piece of software without.

A couple of web pages and an user support forum are no substitution for a comprehensive, structured manual, nor is decent discoverability.

I’m here for the Agenda vs Sidekick flame war.

Heck ya, Sidekick! I remember writing html in sidekick in high school. Until my files got larger than 2k anyway, that was the largest file sidekick could handle. Then I had to switch back to edlin :-(.

For whatever reason, everywhere I went they were using ACT!

(Salesforce killed em all for a reason.)

Memories. I remember the sales staff in particular were disturbingly devoted to Act!, and as the IT guy any time Act! hiccuped, it was a crisis. More than one occasion of a corrupted database resulting in real tears and more than one angry encounter and one actual fistfight resulting from accusations of one salesrep pinching anothers database.

Thanks for linking to the article. For me, what's refreshing about Lotus Agenda is the ability to create views of your own data, something you don't see today unless you are using enterprise cloud services.

Emacs's Org mode has this functionality in its own Agenda features. See also the third-party package org-ql, which provides similar tools, like views (saved searches) and alternative query languages.

As Bob Newell (linked in the article) notes, Emacs and Org seem to carry this torch today. There may still be a few tricks unique to Lotus Agenda and such tools, but Org mostly surpasses them, and its flexibility and extensibility go far beyond what Lotus Agenda and its primitive macro language could do.

As they say best UI is no UI and this software is perfect demonstration of it. For some reason we are struck in myriad of UI frameworks and shiny apps. This feels like regression.

Best thing is this doesn't break the flow of thoughts by forcing user to fill in dates, people etc. in different UI boxes.

I wonder how did they approach the NLP part in 1990 and what more is possible today with deep learning?

Borland Sidekick was a more popular DOS PIM back in the day.

Written by the guy who works on google project zero. He says it's 30 year old software, so I guess the article is from 2019.

This was a fun read, thank you! Makes me appreciate how much is constantly reinvented as years go by...

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