Remembering Lotus Agenda ... why haven't more remembered in the 21st Century?

In the late 1980’s, before Windows really worked and we still had DOS on our computers, Lotus had a product called “Agenda”. Surely well before its time as the product died because, apparently, the market didn’t “get” it. It had no real structure for the data, and created structure from the data. For whatever reason, it resonated with me and I relied on it for helping me manage all kinds of personal information.

The key feature that I found useful (and amazing for its time) was the capability for Agenda to inspect the content of of the “item” and assign one or more “categories”. You could then, once categories collected. organise them into whatever structure you wanted, including hierarchical. Categories are basically what we call “tags” today. You just dumped data into the application and it would structure it for you.

What we have now is a huge number of applications, including the operating systems, using user-assigned “tags” to things (tasks, files, contacts, calendar events, etc.). Other than DevonTHINK (auto-classify), I see few applications do this automatic tag assignments and organizing. Pity.

DOS computers (hardware and software) hardly had any power compared to now, but Lotus Agenda did it extremely well and was lightening fast. It’s now 25-30 years later. Why do we not have this? Or, what would it take to get it?

Or maybe I’m missing something. (that would not be a unique event for me!)

I ran Lotus Agenda too, it was the underdog app that was always remembered for its “potential”. It really was quite innovative, and I still have not seen many applications like it (if any).

The decision to not make a Windows version was when I saw that development was about to stop, so I gave up on it. Sad thing it never was open sourced, or some small shop could have done something great with that code.

I was at Lotus at the time…great product, out of Ed Belove’s R&D team. Way ahead of its time. Maybe tomorrow’s AI focus will finally bring make its functionality more widespread.