Re: Welcome!

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 590

Posted by dmason
2000-05-26 20:50:28

This group is a dream come true! My first outliner was ThinkTank, I think) on a KayPro, circa 1983. I found it an incredible way to organize stuff: project planning, to-do lists, and I started collecting restaurant reviews and outlining them by neighborhood. I used it with a ramdisk box that plugged into the printer port (a whole meg!), which made everything run remarkably fast for its day.

Then PC-Outline arrived. I got it bundled with WordStar 4.0 or 5.0 for DOS, perhaps around 1990. It seemed clunky and counter-intuitive at first, but I persevered and eventually moved everything over. I got a little Gateway Handbook and put a lot of outlines on it. Very handy.

Then progress in outliners seemed to die. MS Word had outline capability but it took forever to load and I couldn’t find a way to move stuff over, so just I stuck with PCO. However I’m pushing harder for a replacement now because not being able to do stuff with a mouse just seems too restrictive, especially jumping back and forth between windows.

The outline concept needs to be extended more to spreadsheets. There’s inevitably the same need for summary vs. detail once they’re over a certain size.

Likewise with database reports. I’ve constantly done detail and summary versions of the same report. I’d love to give users a file version that they could expand/contract and then print.

Undoubtedly outlines can be combined with hypertext, DDE/OLE, CPM/PERT, what else?

- Dave

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