Xerox PARC-developed early Networked note-writing software. Graph-based, with typed links and nodes.
Reading these old papers, I’m struck by how many of the problems are still quite pertinent in today’s systems. It’s still quite difficult for people (and me!) to structure their thoughts in the unusual atomized format required by these systems. We still lack compositional primitives which allow us to create effective layers of abstraction. Our navigational tools are still mostly ineffective.
Halasz, F. G., Moran, T. P., & Trigg, R. H. (1986). Notecards in a nutshell. Proceedings of the SIGCHI/GI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and Graphics Interface, 45–52. https://doi.org/10.1145/29933.30859
Halasz, F. G. (2001). Reflections on NoteCards: Seven issues for the next generation of hypermedia systems. ACM Journal of Computer Documentation, 25(3), 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1145/507317.507321