The Yahoo group backup site and GrandView

Posted by Cassius
Dec 14, 2007 at 02:48 AM

First, a bit of history:

This forum began at http://www.outliners.com. This Web site was begun by Dave Winer, developer of More for the MAC and, I believe, developer of OPML. He originally hosted outliners.com on his company’s servers, but due to illness and possibly other reasons, he left the company and shortly later, the new management killed the outliners.com site. Winer went to Harvard, and managed to put the site up on a Harvard server. However, there were continuing problems, possibly due to excessive use of the server by students or faculty.

We ALL owe Dave Winer a debt of gratitude for all the effort he put into outliners.com and the other outliner development and work he did.

To maintain some continuity, in case outliners.com completely disappeared, one member, Steve Cohen, set up a “backup” Yahoo group which outliners.com members could join. The idea was for the Yahoo group to act as a successor to outliners.com, should it entirely disappear.

Later, one kind member, Chris Murtland, offered to create a new outliner Web site—the one you currently are in. We also owe Chris a big THANK-YOU!!!. Chris seems to have disappeared from recent postings, so I fervently hope all is well with him.

So, if the unthinkable happens and this site disappears, you might wish to go to
. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/outliners-pims/
. and sign up as a member. I think membership approval by Steve (or co-moderators) is needed because the group was being heavily spammed. Steve occasionally visits the site to post a message so that Yahoo doesn’t declare it to be dead. Thus, if you try to sign up now as a member, it may be a few months before Steve sees your membership request and approves it.

Now, what does this have to do with GrandView?

Some time ago, an outliners-pims member placed the GV program in the Files section of the Group. It was removed, probably because of copyright concerns, but it appears that the poster obtained GV from one of the Web sites that archive moribund software. I expect that some Googling around might find the program. Of course, the program may be loaded with spyware, malware, viruses, etc. (By the way, a free, slightly crippled version of PC Tools Spyware doctor is available in the Google Pack.)

As to using GV: It was a full-featured outliner, a calendar, and had columns like Ecco. It also had a more friendly, alternate view to the columns, had keyboard macros and the ability to reassign functions to other key combinations. It also had special keys not on the menus:

To access the menus you must press ALT-F1 and the first letter of the desired menu. To access HELP, press ALT-/ .

To access the special keys: ALT-F1, S, K, S

To close, use ALT-Q.

The program took me some time to learn (20 years ago), but should be less effort for someone already familiar with GV. It works best in DOS, Win3.1 and Win 98. Additional info has been posted here in earlier messages. You can try Googling for them too. NOTHING in the Windows world comes close to GV.

-c