Mail system

Ken G. Brown kbrown at tnc.com
Wed Feb 23 21:44:13 UTC 2000


Doug Engelbart in his Colloquium at Stanford, An In-Depth Look at 
"The Unfinished 
Revolution",<http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/engelbart/colloquium/index.html> 
talks of the  "Dynamic Knowledge Repository" as a place where 
technology can be leveraged to improve mankind's *ability* to solve 
complex problems. He talks of a system 'Augment/NLS' which has been 
previously been implemented with extensive hyperlinking-style 
facilities along with other features which allow far more powerful 
ways of managing knowledge and information.

It occurred to me that all these emails could benefit from a system 
where instead of including the quoted sections over and over again, 
the original email could be stored in a database (or DKR) and just be 
pointed to in full or in part via a system of tags as they have done 
in Augment/NLS. After all, I wonder how much of the 123 MBytes is 
just duplication.

What would be the feasibility of implementing such a system with 
Celeste? Seems like a good database implementation would allow much 
more efficient access. This could be extended outside the local email 
domain to include bookmarks and notes relative to them from the net, 
etc. too.
    Ken

At 3:33 PM -0800 on 2/22/00,  John.Maloney at disney.com is rumored to 
have written:

>Yep, Steve Putz and I wrote Babar at Xerox PARC and it was used
>internally both at PARC and at ParcPlace Systems for a number of
>years. Celeste was a simple re-implementation of Babar that I wrote
>as a graduate student at the University of Washington. I ported it
>Squeak, and several other folks including Mike Rutenberg and
>Lex Spoon have added a number of important enhancements.
>
>I've currently got a 123 MBytes in my Celeste mail database, but this is
>quite a bit past the point at which Celeste works well! :->
>
>I will probably break this into several mail archives by year.
>Celeste works quite nicely up to several thousand messages, however,
>and it's totally great to have a mail browser that you can modify.
>Most important, Celeste has been extremely reliable. New messages are
>always written by appending to the file, and in an emergency you can
>regenerate the message index file by scanning the message file.
>This is modeled on Squeak changes file logging; the goal is to
>be able to recover gracefully even from something as dramatic as
>a power failure while fetching your mail.
>
>Incidentally, I think it is best to think of any mail reader as
>a mail database--the most important goal is to retain and organize
>old messages so you can find what you want quickly. If you have
>this, then lots of experiments can be done with the user interface
>without risking the integrity of the mail itself.
>
>	-- John
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