Roam, Twenty Years Earlier than Roam
When Ted Nelson invented hypertext, his concepts have been far more bold
than any certainly one of their realizations. Particularly, hyperlinks have been all the time meant to be
bidirectional: if A hyperlinks to B, B is aware of this. However when Tim Berners-Lee invented
the online, he needed to throw so much overboard to fulfill the constraints of the
time. The early net was served as static HTML on file servers, dynamic
server-side rendering was just a few years away, and this precludes loads of options
that require reside servers and databases.
The discharge of Roam was a Cambrian explosion within the beforehand moribund
discipline of non-public info administration, the place as much as that point your selections
had been Evernote and org-mode. It led to a gentle stream of
copycats: Obsidian, RemNote, Logseq, and so forth. Roam’s key
function was bidirectional hyperlinks, like within the goals of Nelson. All of its
successors have introduced this function alongside.
And right here’s the twist: MediaWiki has had bidirectional hyperlinks for twenty
years. However they’re extraordinarily deemphasized: there’s a tiny hyperlink within the sidebar,
“What hyperlinks right here”, that whenever you click on on it reveals you the record of backlinks.
I believed this was comparatively frequent data, and was shocked after I
tweeted about it:
It seems many individuals don’t know this! I suppose it is a lesson in how unhealthy
UX can condemn a function that might have been revolutionary to obscurity, such
that it took twenty extra years for somebody to understand that backlinks need to
be put front-and-center, and ignite a revolution in info administration.
And the way previous is that this function? On a fast search, the earliest point out I discovered is
on the release notes for version 1.1, from 8 December 2003:
Whatlinkshere now sorted alphabetically
Nineteen years.