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.
I appreciate comments, suggestions and bug-reports.
Please send these to liz-comments@dijkmat.nl.
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