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Comment by simongray | Hacker News Reader

> Bi-directional linking, by contrast, creates a link from the first note to the second, and from the second to the first automatically. Roam made this extremely easy to accomplish—just by typing pieces of your notes in [[ brackets ]] you could link between notes, and even create new ones if the note you were linking to didn’t already exist.

I don't think Roam invented this. I remember using Notational Velocity on my mac ~10 years ago which is centred around this concept, also using those double brackets in the exact same way.

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If you are curious, Clifford Adams and I originated the double brackets for UseModWiki to support Wikipedia’s initial roll out (on UseModWiki) and their need for “free links” instead of WikiWords. Prior to that I don’t know of any use of that syntax.

Systems following were cloning Wikipedia I assume.

I am glad I am still causing endless chittering about syntax choices twenty years on. I am sure my gravestone will be “[[RIP]]”.

Single brackets were used for numbered or named “footnotes” by the way.

Here is the design discussion.

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/FreeLink

Interesting! I've wondered about that. (Also: hi again! we seem to have so many shared interests over the decades — bbs, usenet, gamedev, c2 wiki, programming languages — that we should meet up someday)

Well, come hang out on MeatballWiki. I reopened it during the pandemic for us lost digital souls.

What makes Roam‘s backlinks more useful is what I think of the "write in to pages" pattern. Because on the linked page, the linked items are not actually links but fully transcluded blocks. If there‘s 10 levels below, they are all included in the page. My Roam content is 90% nested daily notes, but a lot of time is spent on pages that have 0 content. The backlinks area is the collaged together page.

All other tools i‘ve seen fall flat on this because they implement backlinks as links, not block transclusion portals.

I can say for sure that TiddlyWiki had backlinks many years before Roam existed.

Edit: Okay, I was curious, so I searched the Google Groups page, and found it mentioned as an existing feature in 2006: https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/KQRS-_sKukQ/m/DXZk9...

It is referenced as a feature on WikiMatrix, so it was clearly an established feature for wikis by that point.

I wonder if it is, in any way, related to Xerox PARC's NoteCards[1] built in 1984, i.e., "Links are used to represent binary connections between cards."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoteCards

If you dig deep enough, you always end with Vannevar Bush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think

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