1
General Software Discussion / Re: MaxThink
« on: December 05, 2008, 11:46 AM »
Getting back to the concerns that made me want to post in the first place.... Here is a note I sent out to folks in my company. Somebody was interested in a tool to maniplulate links. The general feeling is that, while there are fancy tools for certain applications, there isn't a simple tool that is fully general, in being able to link a lot of stuff and create views of the network.
=======
"UltraRecall seems to have the network model you are looking for. You might have overlooked it because of the way it is being packaged.
A description of the model is in the manual. Go here http://www.kinook.co.../?gettingstarted.htm , then hit Basic Concepts, then Logical Linking.
It doesn’t appear to do much visualization, but you can export, and they seem to be open to suggestions.
I stumbled into UltraRecall because your question got me thinking about Houdini. This posting was in the UltraRecall developer’s discussion list:
“There used to be a DOS product - back in the '90s [and a CPM version before that] - called Houdini by a company called MaxThink. MaxThink's flagship product was an outliner called MaxThink. It still sort of exists, but the product never migrated well to the Windows environment. And Houdini never made it at all. MaxThink had all kinds of wonderful stuff (bin sorting, hoisting, super easy hypertext, and all kinds of bells and whistles that I don't believe I'll ever see again). This is not about that.
Houdini was a non-hierarchical relation machine. You could set up hierarchies without difficulty. But you could go far beyond that. You could simply tag items randomly and have them be related to the starting item. This could be any node, anywhere in the system. This is as close to "synaptic relationships" as I've ever seen in this kind of program.
I'd really like to be able to easily specify ad-hoc relationships within UltraRecall. Not just a one-way hyperlink, useful as that is. But many-to-one and one-to-many links would be invaluable to me.
Regards, Bal”
I can’t tell whether Houdini has something that UltraRecall does not. The developer could not see a difference. I do know that Houdini was the ultimate link model that you are asking for, but it was all model and nothing else. It was mind-blowing. So much so that nobody could figure out what to do with it.
=======
"UltraRecall seems to have the network model you are looking for. You might have overlooked it because of the way it is being packaged.
A description of the model is in the manual. Go here http://www.kinook.co.../?gettingstarted.htm , then hit Basic Concepts, then Logical Linking.
It doesn’t appear to do much visualization, but you can export, and they seem to be open to suggestions.
I stumbled into UltraRecall because your question got me thinking about Houdini. This posting was in the UltraRecall developer’s discussion list:
“There used to be a DOS product - back in the '90s [and a CPM version before that] - called Houdini by a company called MaxThink. MaxThink's flagship product was an outliner called MaxThink. It still sort of exists, but the product never migrated well to the Windows environment. And Houdini never made it at all. MaxThink had all kinds of wonderful stuff (bin sorting, hoisting, super easy hypertext, and all kinds of bells and whistles that I don't believe I'll ever see again). This is not about that.
Houdini was a non-hierarchical relation machine. You could set up hierarchies without difficulty. But you could go far beyond that. You could simply tag items randomly and have them be related to the starting item. This could be any node, anywhere in the system. This is as close to "synaptic relationships" as I've ever seen in this kind of program.
I'd really like to be able to easily specify ad-hoc relationships within UltraRecall. Not just a one-way hyperlink, useful as that is. But many-to-one and one-to-many links would be invaluable to me.
Regards, Bal”
I can’t tell whether Houdini has something that UltraRecall does not. The developer could not see a difference. I do know that Houdini was the ultimate link model that you are asking for, but it was all model and nothing else. It was mind-blowing. So much so that nobody could figure out what to do with it.