Eccentric Flower:199903/too good to succeed
From Eccentric Flower
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five march too good to succeed All right, so continuing the narrative from the previous postcard ... after the hairbrush excursion, I went out to a friend's house to copy some diskettes. I have no computer at this time with a working 5.25" floppy drive. Shucks, even 3.5" drives are getting rarer these days - I barely use mine, and the iMacs (as has been well publicised) don't have one. I have a drive, but it's in a dead computer. So I did a lot of fiddling around and rewiring and such to get it to work. I couldn't. Finally I went to my friend's and copied all the 5.25" disks (low density 5.25" disks, I might add - a mammoth 360 KB apiece) onto 3.5" high-density disks, one for one - a huge waste of space, but what the heck. I didn't feel like trying to to it the efficient way. The reason for all this finagling is a program called IZE, the last of my software on old-size diskettes that I want to preserve. In fact, I wanted it badly. I have a boxful of 5.25 disks that I haven't opened in ages, but hardly a day goes by when I don't think of IZE. It was made by Persoft in 1988 and vanished without a trace. Too good to succeed. IZE hits a nerve with me because it addresses a fundamental problem I have when working. Basically I want to take documents and link them together in odd ways. Say I'm writing notes about Sethin timekeeping. I realize, once I've got ten paragraphs, that this is out of hand. Right then, what I want to do is: 1. Cut the timekeeping comments out of the main notes document. IZE does this, and nothing else I've ever seen does. HTML would be good (I write in HTML these days, adding the tags without even thinking), but you can't add and delete links dynamically. HTML requires an interpreter - what you see in the source document is not the same as the "interpreted" version in your browser, and many of the features (such as links) only work once interpreted. That means it's unsuitable for my purpose. HyperCard also has an interpreter stage. Database programs usually don't handle long blocks of text well (FileMaker comes closest), don't make it easy enough to add/delete links, don't keep the data in mostly-text format, and in general are the wrong tool for the job. Electronic sticky-notes programs have the ease and dynamism, but no linking. IZE is a beautiful program. Eventually, as you work, you find that you have developed a collection of documents which are related to one another through their linkages. This is called a "textbase" in IZE-speak. It is IZE's fundamental working unit. You don't open and close documents in IZE; you open and close textbases. Each textbase remembers where you were and can drop you at exactly the same place you left off. IZE knows which documents in the textbase were saved or not saved and does the Right Thing at all times. If you quit without saving all your changes, IZE doesn't consider these "changed but unsaved" documents the same as the saved ones; it saves them, but holds them separately, so that when you come back, you can see what you were working on that you didn't save - and revert, if you decided you didn't like what you were doing the day before. IZE is an outliner's dream. It allows you to sort and outline the loose collection of documents in the textbase so many ways, I can't count them. You can have it do the sorting for you, by date, by linkage, by saved vs. unsaved; you can flag or create keywords for each document and outline on those any number of ways; you can create an outline of your own from scratch in several ways ... et cetera. But it is not a word processor. Its text formatting is minimal. It is not a database. It's a tool for people who want to create a collection of interlocked ideas that matches the way they think ... and that audience, apparently, was and is minimal. "Thought organizer" programs were big in the mid-nineties. IZE was a few years ahead of its time. It came out when the big argument in the computing community was whether Microsoft Word would ever beat WordPerfect for market dominance. The irony is that, for all my struggles to get it back again, I probably won't be able to use IZE much. My working platforms are Mac and Unix these days, and IZE is a DOS program. It's just too much trouble to go back and forth. This is a program which is designed to keep information accessible - having it on a different system defeats that purpose. If I could somehow find the source code for this beast ... it can't be that complex a program by today's standards ... I'd find a way to port it. Somehow. Because there isn't anything else which does this that I've found.
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