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Group Notes

Group Notes was a generalization of the original Notes. Now there could be an unlimited number of notesfiles, and users would be able to create private notesfiles for use by their own work groups. Group notesfiles would serve the same purposes for which notes categories were designed with none of the inherent problems. The 60-category limit vanished. Distributing notes across many files solved the technical problems of dealing with large volumes of information. The burden of managing notesfiles would be distributed, as well; no longer would the system staff have to oversee everything. And, yes, notes would be organized by subject, as so many people had insisted. Group Notes is one of those ideas that, with hindsight, seems glaringly obvious.

Group Notes was released in January, 1976, and thereafter use of Notes skyrocketed. Soon there were public notesfiles for subjects like books, movies, religion, music, and science fiction, as well as many private notesfiles for work groups.

The internal structure of notesfiles still had not changed much since 1973, and it was beginning to show its weaknesses. In particular, it made it difficult to implement a sorely needed option to read all responses written since a certain date and time. So I rewrote Notes almost from scratch, and converted all notesfiles to a new internal structure in July, 1976. Although it has been modified many times since, this version forms the core of the Notes software still in use today.


Copyright © 1994 by David R. Woolley

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Copyright (c) 1996 - 2006 Elizabeth Mattijsen
I appreciate comments, suggestions and bug-reports.
Please send these to liz-comments@dijkmat.nl.
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