Tinderbox and Lotus Agenda

Angela Booth compares Tinderbox with an old program called Lotus Agenda, which runs only on Microsoft DOS. Like Tinderbox, Agenda allows you to store information and worry about categorizing it later; somewhat like DevonThink, it can categorize information itself. Also like Tinderbox, Agenda attracted an enthusiastic and loyal following but, despite its power, remained a niche product in the marketplace, losing share to less capable programs with interfaces that were easier to grasp without thinking. (In software, as in everything from literature to food, the superficial and meretricious displaces the intricate and substantial.)

Agenda is apparently being reborn as Chandler, the slowly developing but promising open-source information management platform. Agenda was written by Mitch Kapor, who founded the organization developing Chandler.