This time Stone Tools investigates ThinkTank on the PC w/DOS, by Dave Winer. As a self-described “idea processor,” this outliner software is of a genre I’ve only ever had glancing familiarity with. Winer makes the DOS version available for free on his website, so it was impossible to resist the opportunity to check it out. Since launching the genre in 1983, a veritable religion has formed around outliners and other personal knowledge managers.
Read on to see if I saw the light!
What is Stone Tools?
Unlike many retro-enthusiast blogs, Stone Tools focuses exclusively on productivity software during the 8/16-bit era. No games; just work. I spend weeks learning the software and give my honest, lighthearted assessment: how was it perceived at the time, what is it like to learn and use, and does it have utility today?
Thanks for another interesting and informative review. If you want to explore futher in this direction I’d say you should definitely take a look at both … the original outliner; and the second most hyped personal information manager of all time, Lotus Agenda (there’s even a book about its attempted successor, Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg (ISBN 1-4000-8246-3).
Thanks for continuing to read, and I’m happy you found it interesting. Of course I’m familiar with the “Mother of All Demos” and have fantasized about doing a “Mother of All Reviews.” The closest option I’ve seen to trying that system out is hyperscope which specifically requires Firefox 2.0 to run. It seems like the Computer History Museum had a clone of the original running on Linux in 2006, but nothing has been made public. Ah well, there’s plenty of other stuff to keep me busy for a long, long while yet.
Lotus Agenda definitely looks right up my alley (I think it was also suggested by someone in a different forum). Thanks also for the book tip; it is perfectly aligned with my reading interests to date.