Getting back to the concerns that made me want to post in the first place....
-myersk
Wow! Hope you're not too 'put off' by digressions. You'll see a lot of them up here on DC's forums.
Apparently, many people (who don't mind having their brains picked) tend to digress and ramble a bit.
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Houdini may have been an interesting concept, but I don't think it deserves the awe it receives from some quarters. Houdini was primarily a browser. Unfortunately, there's a great deal of unnecessary mystique that has built up about it over the years. I've got copies of all of Nils Larson's products. (I still like MaxThink.) But before I bought anything, I called Mr. Larson up way back when (1991) to ask him exactly what Houdini was. It was a very
interesting phone conversation.
In the end, I bought everything in the Maxthink catalog,
except for Houdini. Not that it mattered. They included a copy of Houdini with my order anyway.
There are significant differences between the concept of
relationships, and the concept of
associations. Rather than call Houdini a
relation machine, I'd tend more to think of it as a tool to map
associations between a large number of text snippets. By itself, it's not much more than a note taking system that incorporates a tool that would later come to be called
hyperlinking.
It did have some interesting features that lent themselves to brainstorming and other free associative exercises, but it was still just basically a shoebox with a browser front-end. And it was limited by the technology of the time. It allowed something like 2500 notes and 7500 internal links, although it also allowed (theoretically) unlimited linking to external ASCII and other Houdini files if I recall correctly.
The problem with Houdini wasn't so much that people didn't understand it. The problem was that Houdini's philosophy and methodology only worked well for a certain class of projects. You couldn't just plug everything you did into Houdini's framework. It was great for serendipitous discovery and associative thinking. It was next to useless for projects that could be better approached via inductive/deductive thinking methodologies. Furthermore, Houdini really only came into its own when it was used for collaborative thinking projects. That part of Houdini was revolutionary for its time. A single person was better off just using the
MaxThink outliner in conjunction with the
TransText wordprocessor. And that's exactly what most people did.
Now. if you're looking for the modern version of Houdini, look no further than the web and your favorite wiki engine. That's what Houdini was pointing towards. If you took Larson's vision of Houdini to it's logical conclusion, it would probably look much like Wikipedia.
Onward...
Have you tried looking at the
TheBrain? It has many conceptual similarities to Houdini.
http://www.thebrain.com/#-50---
BTW (to:myersk): Is that your "grid redevelopment project" that's up on WiserEarth.com ?
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