I am among the millions of users of Evernote, and I have been struck by its many similarities to a software package from the early 1990s called Thought Pattern™. This was a note-taking package that made little impact on the market but which I found very useful at the time.

As with Evernote, a Thought Pattern user can enter notes with text and pictures, and assign keywords to each note. This makes it possible to search later by the terms in the card, or by themes that the cards have in common, even if the name of the theme appears nowhere in the text of the card itself. Unstructured data can be challenging to manage. With a large unstructured database used by many people, communal usage patterns can train the system about related content even in the absence of identical terms. However, for smaller datasets and user bases, explicit tagging of the sort used by Evernote and Thought Pattern is much better. Highly structured data can be handled in a traditional database management system, but a lot of information in the real world doesn’t conform to any simple rigid system of fields and records.

Thought Pattern also allowed the user to link content from other applications to cards, where it was represented by icons and would open if double-clicked. The program had one major feature that Evernote lacks — it was possible to attach an alarm to each card. Thought Pattern also had a better logo.

I rode a bicycle across most of the United States in 1993 wearing a Thought Pattern t-shirt.

Thought Pattern lacked of course the networked ubiquity that makes Evernote so useful. Nonetheless, it was a great program that I found useful. Credit to Stephen Zagerman of Bananafish Software for being ahead of his time.

Seven minutes remain in Bob Dylan’s 70th Birthday. I’m listening to Eliza Gilkyson’s new cover of “Jokerman,” and remembering that on the occasion of Bob’s fiftieth birthday I hosted a 24 hour Orgy™ of his music on WHRB-FM. I collected an array of bootlegs for the event, a project that was a lot more fun in the days before digital piracy. During the show, in the middle of the night, an enormous manic-depressive named Wombat stopped by the studio to join us. The station got appreciative letters for weeks, including some from people who drove their cars to a parking lot near our offices in Memorial Hall and sat, listening for hours. One man wrote about holding his young son in front of the radio in the hopes the boy would grow up to appreciate the music the way his father did. Funny the things you remember, decades later.

I found a copy of the Adobe Pagemaker 4 file for the poster we used to advertise the event. The screenshot below is from an emulator running Macintosh System 7 without Adobe Type Manager but I don’t think it looks too terrible.

One of my sons discovered the Apple ][e this morning. He likes keyboards, and pounded on this one for a bit.

2009 youth with 1983 Apple //

I thought it would be amusing to render the image in Apple ][ hi-res graphics. I think it would come out something like this:

8bit Youth

It worked.

Bank Street Writer

It’s in black and white only; I don’t know whether to blame the computer, the TV, or the cable. Also, one of the disc drives seems to be shot and I can’t find a functioning copy of AppleWorks. The copy I have crashes when trying to put new files on the desktop. Amusingly, it has saved the date it was last used for use in time stamping new files — May 14, 1986. I suspect that was the day we got our Mac Plus. I didn’t touch the Apple II for another 25 years.

Pirated Apple II games. I feel a little guilty.

Archon worked, as did a number of other games. I found the pirate-added splash screens more interesting than the games. Was there anything to be gained from these other than prestige? Where is “The Burglar” today?