NoteCards

Frank Halasz designed NoteCards [HMT87] at Xerox PARC, first as a research system, but it was later offered as a commercial product. NoteCards was developed on the Xerox Lisp machines, using the InterLisp programming environment. In this environment the built application becomes part of the environment, so users can easily implement specialized node types if they know the Lisp language.

Each node is a single notecard, which can contain an arbitrary amount of information. Like Guide and Intermedia, scrolling is used to display different parts of the node. When following a link the destination node can be displayed in a new window, possibly overlapping the old window. Users can open as many windows as they want, thus generating a messy desktop.

NoteCards has over 50 specialized types of cards, for applications that need special data structures, with a special layout.

Links are typed connections between cards. The type is a label chosen by the creator of the link, and can indicate the kind of relation between the source and the destination node.

The browser card shows a graphical overview of the link structure of the hyperdocument. Different link types are indicated using different line patterns.

Cards can be nested hierarchically, using a FileBox. FileBoxes are special cards and can contain both FileBoxes and other NoteCards.