I was searching for some info on old PIMs I used to use back in the 80s and 90s, and stumbled on Google Books (books.google.com). I typed in "ecco pro packrat pim" and got to read some of the old articles that I probably read about these and other products back in the day. It brought back good (and some bad) memories of how I used to research PIMs back then, reading every magazine article I could and finally making that decision to buy the software. No real demo software, you had to be sure before you took out the credit card.

Since I am moving (back) to Devonthink Office Pro, I was just reminiscing about the software I used in the past, and how I am still searching for the Holy Grail now. If I ever added up all of the time I spent researching, trying, learning, reorganizing, etc. of new software, I probably could have earned a PhD by now. But what would be the fun of that ;)

Sometimes, I'll go back to the old websites to see what's going on with some of my early-2000 PIMs.

Besides Lotus Organizer and Franklin Agenda (I think that's what the Franklin Covey system was called?), I still have lots of data stored in PIMEX (www.pimexonline.com) and NeoMem (www.neomem.org).

-- Glen

Hah! Great topic...

Some of the antique PIMs I once used:
- Instant Recall, a nice little DOS PIM
- GrandView (of course)
- Memory Mate
- EccoPro
- InfoSelect

In most cases, you not only couldn't try out the software, but you also had to pay over $100 in 1980s dollars. It's certainly a different world, but nevertheless the quest goes on!

Steve Z.

My main ones were

Contact Plus (which I was looking up)
PackRat
Ecco Pro
Zoot
InfoSelect

Then I moved to a Mac and started using
Journler
TaskPaper
Evernote
OmniOutliner
DevonThink

Who knows what is next. Maybe I will finally settle down and stay with a piece of software for a decade.

Vince

Lotus Notes and Lotus Agenda.

I don't mourn the passing of my usage of Lotus Notes (or at least the way I was required to use it by my employer - I always had the feeling that if I could get my head round the way it was designed to be used, it would turn out to be less of a beast and more of a benefit).

But Lotus Agenda I did like and value; at the time it seemed ground-breaking.

H

Mention of Lotus Organizer reminds me that I bought it soon after it was launched by a company called, I think, Threadz. It seemed a better product then before Lotus bought it, or at least it stood out from the crowd. It had a graphical diary interface and internal links (represented, as far as I remember, by an anchor icon); these were not common features at the time.

Strangely, I've missed much of the tools discussed here; I don't think I had even heard of them at the time. In the 80's, as a student, I had mostly used word processors and Framework, apart for dedicated engineering software. Then, up to the mid-90's I worked mostly with flat-file and relational databases: I recall File Express, Alpha 4, Wampum (!) and Paradox; I never learnt dBase. I also used Word Perfect 5.1 and Quattro Pro.

Then Windows 95 came, we moved on to MS Word, Excel and Access, and it took me half a decade to recover and get my stuff under control again --assuming I ever did.

I also fondly remember the original Threadz Organizer, which, for my part, was ruined by the Lotus takeover. The original had a useful feature whereby a single day could have one entry, making it ideal for keeping a diary. Lotus chopped the day into hourly segments with no way of avoiding this business-oriented model. It took days to export my data from the program and I've never touched a Lotus product again.

Although not strictly a PIM I first purchased Blackwell's "Idealist" in the early 1990s, stayed with version 3 which was released in 1995 (I found the subsequent version 5 - there was no v.4 - produced by Bekon after Blackwell sold the program to be quite 'buggy') and continue to use Idealist 3 to this day. It has operated on every Windows platform, has never crashed and I have never lost data. There can't be too many programs with that record.

From the same era, I continue to use askSam, having had every version since the first Windows, and am now beta-testing version 8, but development seems to have slowed to a crawl in recent years. Such a shame as I always thought this program could have been a world-beater if properly developed and marketed.

Geoffrey

One other '80s app that I've just recalled was Sidekick. It was my first real PIM with a calendar and other utilities. The big deal was that with Sidekick you could copy text from one application and paste it into another... This was the first time I encountered this feature and it was breaktaking to be able to do this!

How things have changed.

Steve Z.

Ah Sidekick! According to Wikipedia: "Long time users of Sidekick 98 report no difficulties continuing to use the program through subsequent iterations of Windows, up to and including Windows 7." However I suspect that Sidekick 98 doesn't really represent the real, original Sidekick usage experience. ("Terminate and Stay Resident" was the jargon name for the type of DOS programme that the original Sidekick represented - a great title for a horror movie I've always thought.)

I abandoned Sidekick for Threadz Organizer, which I bought as a floppy direct from the developer in person at some trade show or another. As you say, Steve, how times have changed!

Hugh wrote:

"Terminate and
Stay Resident" was the jargon name for the type of DOS programme that the original
Sidekick represented
- a great title for a horror movie I've always thought.)

Hmm, Terminator vs. Resident Evil.

Could be a blockbuster crossover film like Alien vs. Predator!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_vs._Predator_%28film%29

For me, the late 1980s and early 1990s was the golden age of personal computing, when computers augmented our brains before Google replaced them. At least, I have never since been as excited about software. Lotus Agenda remains my all-time favorite piece of software. And in the my-how-things-have-changed department, how about those manuals that used to come with Lotus software? As I recall, the Agenda manual was four or five thick volumes. A far cry from Zoot XT!

You all are late to the party. I was running KAMAS, an outliner, on my Kaypro 4 under CP/M. Cannot remember exactly when but I am thinking early 80s. Would dump all outliners, PMs, etc in a heartbeat if I could find a true relational database; viz., MS Access, if only it allowed for creation of hierarchical table. I mean have any of you actually dabbled with QBE? IMHO you actually have not conducted a search until you have created a multi-table search on multiple fields using the myriad of connectors and operators that are usually available.

Brilliant is a true relational database which uses folders in a tree-like structure, but so far as I can tell the folders are not a traditional RDM table. Besides, creating queries is too laborious for me as I was spoiled beyond recovery by MS Access QBE.

I have tested UR but unlike Pavi Johnson I found its exporting to RTF quirky. I dragged and dropped cases in txt format to create UR items but was unable to export them at all much less as RTF documents. I am sticking with Writing Outliner, but I am clearly missing out writing on the nuggets I am sure are in the database because of limited search capabilities. Again, unless you have worked with QBE.....

Mitchell Kastner wrote:

You all are late to the party. I was running KAMAS, an outliner, on my Kaypro 4 under
CP/M.

I'm of a younger generation, but I think I did get KAMAS running on DoxBox a year or two ago, and it looked good.

Cannot remember exactly when but I am thinking early 80s. Would dump all
outliners, PMs, etc in a heartbeat if I could find a true relational database; viz., MS
Access, if only it allowed for creation of hierarchical table.

What about InfoQube? I believe it's built on the same engine (jet-something?) as MS Access. And it's query language is close to SQL, I seem to recall.

My favorite information manager during the 1990s was ProCite. I used it not only for citations but also (by renaming fields) as a general database. It made a surprisingly good note-taker.

I still have it installed on both of my computers, though I haven't used it for almost a decade, and I have countless ProCite files that have never been liberated.

Just writing about it makes me almost nostalgic!

My first outliner/PIM was built into my first DOS machine, a NEC laptop with two floppy drives and no hard disk. As I recall, it was single pane, plain text, and each outline item could be only a single line. TAB and Shift-TAB were used to shift an item left or right (i.e., make a "child")

I also used Memory Mate and a program to keep one program running "resident" .while I was using another one. WordPerfect was king then.

Mitchell Kastner wrote:

I mean have any of you actually dabbled with QBE?

Yes, Paradox worked with that and it was excellent. I built my own text database with its 'blob' fields. I had no idea at the time that there were dedicated programs for this. Oh - actually, I suspected so. I had tried Idealist. But it couldn't handle non-latin languages.