Structure or metaphor used in info management software

Posted by tsahar
Mar 17, 2017 at 04:58 PM

On Paul Korm’s suggestion, I wrote to Mark Bernstein who was kind enough to respond to my newbie-ish query (i.e. the first message in this thread). With his permission, I am sharing his response on this forum:

The best and most detailed exploration in (part of) this area, and one of the best reviews of any software sector, is Ted Goransom’s “About This Particular Outliner.” It’s aging but incisive. http://www.atpm.com/Back/atpo.shtml

Personal information tools grew up in an era in which databases seemed to be the core of all information processing, and in which database theory was central to a good deal of thinking about systems. Databases — especially network databases (cf. the work of Charlie Bachmann) — were far more influential than the UI metaphors you describe. See, especially NoteCards (Xerox PARC, Halasz and Trigg) and the Smalltalk-80 book (Goldberg and Kay).

The Proceedings of the ACM Hypertext Conference in its early years are filled with papers in this area, many of them still worth reading.