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Giving some old ideas a New Hope

An open reply to "The lost apps of the 80s"

There is an 2021 article about The lost apps of the 80s in which Dave Winer and Ray Ozzie[1] discuss apps from the eighties that were lost in the transition to the web era.

they seem to be gone. Seemingly forever

One quotes from the article stands out to me especially:

Now, we don't have choice. If I want to write on Facebook, I have to use their awful buggy editor. If I want a Substack newsletter or a Medium blog, or whatever – I have to use their editors, which vary in quality, but none of them would have stood a chance in the 80s software market.

This made me think of the Solid project and its promise to return choices and ownership back to the user. Not just for data, but also for applications, especially with things like Semantic Components and our own New Hope ideas.

Some ideas

As the article is full of great ideas for things that really should make a return into the public consciousness, it feels like a good reference point for future product ideas.

To give you a taste of some of the things mentioned:

Networked Spreadsheets

Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there.

And the responding

networked spreadsheets of one form or another would be amazing – especially given that many real-world spreadsheet scenarios involve periodic consolidation/roll-up involving multiple people and processes

There's already some great work being done for decentralised live information sharing, not just on spreadsheets. The WebSocket Protocol comes to mind, as well as Gun and m-ld.

This feels like something that would really move the masses to a new / renewed era of decentralised collaboration[.

Outliner

ThinkTank and outliners in general is one of them. I don’t understand this because I think there are many outliner-type people out there who would enjoy them, but because they never became mainstream they aren’t being given a chance to be mainstream once again.

Now, if you don't know what Outliners are, that only goes to show how true this quote is.

To quote from the all-describing Wikipedia:

An outliner (or outline processor) is a specialized type of text editor (word processor) used to create and edit outlines, which are text files which have a tree structure, for organization. [..] When loaded into an outliner, an outline may be collapsed or expanded to display as few or as many levels as desired.

In simpler term, think of it as a mind-map, but with a tree structure instead of a node–link diagram. Only then with all underlying data already present in the document (hidden, or folded out of sight until needed).

There has been an Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) spec since 2000 (with a successor in 2006) and, if you prefer semantic-web, an Extensible Open XHTML Outlines (XOXO) spec since 2004.

Dispite this, the only surviving web application seems to be https://workflowy.com/. The (less full-featured) open-source clone https://suy.io/flowy/ "only" has a 100+ stars.

screenshot of workflowy application

This is a shame as, described on http://outliners.scripting.com/, such applications indeed seem to add a wealth of features for typical-thinking users.[2]

Combined with the power of semantic data, this also seems like a prime candidate to bring back to life!

Lotus Notus

A VC friend told me several years ago that it was incredible that even though there is now a wave of “low code” tools such as Airtable, that there is nothing out there with the power and usability that Lotus Notes had back-in-the-day. And so we cobble together many tools, ignoring the fact that there was a better answer that we’ve chosen to discard.

This one hits especially close to home, as the main prototype application we are currently creating to showcase the power and ideas behind a New Hope are heavily inspired by Notes. We can't show you a working demo yet, but we think our low-code / no-code environment will give a lot of creative power back to the user. That's our intention anyway, so stay tuned to see how things evolve. Or contact my colleague Sjoerd if you can't wait that long!

Time for a revival!

Why have so many great ideas been discarded? Even if their initial implementation was destined never to withstand the test of time, why do we choose to ignore those aspects that were good?

At Muze we feel the same way about the way this web era is evolving.
Some really powerful ideas have been lost and need to be revived.

In an internet that was supposed to allow us to have ‘bubbles’ of special interest groups, why haven’t we created a thriving environment that might support the creation and maintenance of bespoke power tools for creativity and productivity?

We may not have created such things yet but there is a very strong relation between this sentiment, what we at Muze are trying to create, and what the Solid community at large is striving for!

If nothing else, I think there will be a renewed interest in (re)creating software from the pre-web era. Especially in combination with the distributed / anti-silo movement…

https://twitter.com/potherca/status/1461304044048297985

Thank you for reading this,
lets talk again soon!

Authograph Ben

p.s. Feedback more than welcome, either here or on twitter[3]

Footnotes

  1. Ray Ozzie is best know for creating HCL / IBM Notes and Lotus Notes and working as CTO and Chief Software Architect at Microsoft between 2005 and 2010.

  2. And not all is lost, as user manuals for some of these older implementations (like ThinkTank) are available from the Internet Archive.

  3. There's also a thread about the original article on Hacker News.

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