Xerox PARC's NoteCards in a Nutshell (1987) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

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

dl.acm.org

77 pointsmepian26 comments

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!

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.)

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.”

"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) And [Archived Squeak page](http://web.archive.org/web/20050406063507/http://squeak.org/...)

I'm also nostalgic for the early days of personal computing, back then there was more experimentation and when there was a greater sense of wonder about the possibilities. While I feel there are still a lot of exciting advances in other areas of computing such as artificial intelligence, I feel that innovation in the realm of personal computing has stagnated. Moreover, since the rise of Web 2.0 and smartphones, personal computing has been the target of aggressive monetization schemes and UI/UX trends that, in my opinion, have degraded the computing experience compared to the pre-Web 2.0/smartphone era. Of course, I don't want to look at the past with rose-colored glasses; while I'm nostalgic for Windows 95/98/NT/2000, I also feel Microsoft's monopolistic actions in the 1980s and 1990s and the crushing of competitors played a major role in shaping today's situation.

If I were a billionaire, I'd start an R&D group that is dedicated to improving the personal computing experience, producing an open source system.

I was interested in personal computers and then I discovered pre-microprocessor computers. This has got some wild solutions like rod cell memory.

A physical circuit board represent a record of database entry. To program the database one would wrap a copper wire around a rod. The rod would represent a field in a record of the database.

I think.

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/...

I agree with you. And I wonder how the working paradigms and, importantly, the tools, got defined as they are. Not a criticism, but the tools that won. In the younger days of interactive computing, there seemed to be an explosion of creativity on how to manipulate, use and present information, in systems like these and others. Then continents arose (Lotus 123, Excel, Visicalc), (Wordstar, Word, etc), Emacs.. Office quantized a lot of domains, I think. It locked us into tools as the standard of productivity tools and human computer interaction patterns. And, the majority of users use these in their productive use of their time.

> I wonder how the working paradigms and, importantly, the tools, got defined as they are.

Answer: The profit motive.

A cheap retort would be that the profit motive has produced so many great things as well. I am comfortable holding two contradicting ideas in my mind at once, but we need to be careful. The history of computer technology development, including all of its most groundbreaking technological discoveries, is overwhelmingly built on top of publicly funded research with no foreseeable path to profit at the time.

Humans are far more driven by the quest for love, justice, dignity, and discovery than profit. Until we reorganize our society accordingly, we can only expect our greatest accomplishments to be exploited and dismembered by the pursuit of profit.

I've been thinking that mastering the 40+ year old awk language for data manipulation would probably not be harder for a regular accountant than mastering Excel formulae. Being good with awk would possibly add a lot of flexibility to that casual data worker's general computer workflow -- for something like 1% of the cost in terms of computation power.

In reality, because of how tools were introduced to them, I guess most accountants never think outside the GUI-based paradigm.

Seems we are all now using the ultimate product of the hypertext concepts of the 80s: the web itself.

No, the web is just the technology that won, kinda like Windows. Ted Nelson's Xanadu is a much more comprehensive, humane conceptualization of hypertext.

It is an interesting dichotomy, as our computer interfaces get more refined they get harder to program. In the early days every user was a programmer and every interface was expected to be programed by the user. Now there is this wide gulf between using the machine and programing it. where programing it involves a large leap involving additional software and knowledge.

It is why people love shell. shell kind of sucks, but there is this seamless transition from the interactive interface into programing the machine. that is pretty great. look at the early PARC alto demos. note how the windowing system was designed to be discovered, extended and molded to the users will as a part of normal operation. Our modern interfaces are depressingly static by comparison.

A counter point you often hear is that this way of interacting with computers is only appropriate or enjoyable to a small number of people.

It's a lazy, patronising, post-hoc justification, as is the idea that only programmers care about laggy user interfaces. Many people spend their entire working lives in front of a computer screen and programmers by no means represent the pinnacle of human cognition.

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

Hm, cool, but tried and doesn't seem to be working in Firefox.

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.

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.

> 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.

Expanding on that topic:

* Supporting Collaboration in NoteCards

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&d...

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!

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.

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

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.

"roam" isn't easy to search for. Do you have a link.

Does org-mode have the graphical map like NoteCards?

That Roam link would be https://roamresearch.com.

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