Roam Patrol!

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Oct 13, 2020 at 05:32 PM

This discussion brings to mind a program Apple shipped with the early Macintosh (I believe, in 1987) called HyperCard. I haven’t heard much about Hypercard for many years, but I have thought about it periodically as I learn more about these new programs. It seems to me that the potential of Hypercard, which I hadn’t really thought of at the time, is being realized in programs such as Obsidian, Roam, and others. I use Dynalist a lot, and am seriously considering Obsidian.

Daly

bartb wrote:
“The question that fascinates me about all this “new”
>interest is “why now—what changed”. ” .... Exactly!
>IMHO: think one indicator is the sheer volume of data people want to
>track and research is growing too fast for the current toolsets to keep
>up.
> >Paul Korm wrote:
>The technology of Roam or Obsidian is not new—the developers are
>>using existing off the shelf components. What’s “new” is that the
>>business of linking “notes” (or something more granular within a note)
>>is bringing broader awareness of the uses of hypertext theory and
>>information theory dating back decades.
>>
>>The question that fascinates me about all this “new” interest is “why
>>now—what changed”. Obsidian or Roam could have been written a
>>decade or more ago. And if then, they probably didn’t generate much
>>interest. (How many people bought Storyspace when it was first
>>published 33 years ago—Storyspace then, and now, has the same goal
>as
>>these new toys.)
>>
>>I read in Obsidian’s forums very detailed posts about ZKs, PKMs, and
>>MOCs, and PARA and blah blah. Underlying the efforts behind these
>>trends seems to be a general feeling of being overwhelmed by
>>“information” (or data, really—it’s just data) and trying to make
>>connections between “everything I think about .. everything I read ...
>>everything I worry about”. It’s seductive.
>>
>>