I haven't finished The Notebook by Roland Allen, but I am enjoying it. It seems odd that I should find reading about the spread of the use of paper and notebooks thrilling, but I do. In the same way that I find much of the early history of computers or radio or the telegraph thrilling. I'm a nerd, I guess.

Anyway, one of the reasons why I'm enjoying the book is because of the zibaldoni. Kind of the "everything box," people use apps like DevonThink or Apple Notes, or EagleFiler for, only it was done on paper. In a notebook.

Paper notebooks have always appealed to me for reasons I don't understand. Perhaps in the same way that computers do. I was first attracted to computers, not for calculating, not for playing games, but to be able to put text and images on a television.

As a kid growing up, I saw things on TV that other people put there. I fairly distinctly recall the first time I saw an Apple II in a small "home computer" store, and I can recall that what felt most exciting was that it was on the TV.

At the Naval Academy, computers were teletypes. After I was commissioned, I'd seen, and used, those little Sharp handheld computers, with a single line LCD display. Aboard GLOVER we had an HP "desktop calculator" that had a built-in, single line, red dot matrix display, a built-in cassette interface and a thermal printer; and it was attached to a green-screen monitor. It was the ECLIPS, which I think stood for Electronic Calculator Linker Interface Processing System, or something like that. It took Link-14 data, which was just a stream of text that went over radio, normally to a teletype, and processed those text messages into graphical polar display, non-realtime. Anyway, it didn't thrill me.

Seeing that you could type stuff and have it appear on a TV is what did it for me.

I also read a lot of books as a kid. Maybe it's the same thing with notebooks. I could put my words on those.

But I seldom did. When I was working one summer at the office supply store where my dad worked, I bought a blank sketch pad. Nice paper, without any lines. I filled that thing up with drawings of spaceships. Not great drawings, either. But lots of them.

I got my first Apple II, a ][+ near the end of '82, not long before the //e came out. Then I got my first word processor PIE:Writer (Programma International Editor). From then on, most of what I wrote, or drew, was on a screen.

I used notebooks. Little green ones that fit your back pocket. Had to have one of those at officers call, to let the XO know you were paying attention to him. My memory was pretty phenomenal back then, I didn't need to write anything down to remember it, but if you weren't writing it down you were asking to get yelled at.

My late friend was a huge note-taker, and he also maintained a 3-ring binder that might have been considered a zibaldoni. He called it "the bubble book." The "bubble" was how you knew which way was up when you were underwater. Every day, stuff went in and out of the bubble book. Schedules, exercise reports, operations orders, task organizations, threat assessments, weather forecasts.

When I became an Ops Boss, I had an OS, an "operations specialist," maintain a "bubble book" for me. He maintained two, actually, one for me and one for his chief petty officer. I never developed the habit of maintaining a paper notebook.

When I went to shore duty the first time, ThinkTank came out for the Apple II. I maintained my situational awareness in an outline in ThinkTank. I bought an Apple //c, complete with the little 9" white monitor and Imagewriter printer to keep in my office for that purpose. VisiCalc sold a lot of Apple IIs. ThinkTank sold at least one.

Ever since then, most of my "thinking" has been done with a screen.

I'd have to look it up, but my first "everything box," was WebArranger, which was first released as Arrange, by Common Knowledge Software. It originally sold for, I think, $495. It didn't do well in the market and was acquired by CE Software, who released it for a tenth of that price as WebArranger, which is when I bought it.

Arrange was a lot like Tinderbox is, and I loved it. It's different enough that much of my initial confusion in Tinderbox was because the similarities masked the fundamental differences between the two programs.

Arrange never made it to OS X, and CE Software folded or stopped maintaining it. But I used it for a few years until Tinderbox came along, and I just thought it was the greatest software ever made. Tinderbox is better, but we're much more sophisticated today.

But I've gone far afield here, and I need to get out and take a walk, so let me kind of return to the point of this post and why I love the idea of the zibaldoni.

I kind of enjoy reading about other people's notebooks. I took a course in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and a day planner was part of that discipline. It was the GTD of its day.

I've always envied the people who could maintain these elaborate notebooks. People who had devised these highly defined systems, like bullet-journaling. People who could do morning pages, every morning. I admire that.

Similarly, I look on what people do with their PKM ("personal knowledge management") systems or processes. Obsidian, Roam, zettelkasten. Amazing stuff.

I can't do that.

I don't have the patience, the discipline, the interest in investing that much into process. I gag on the word "workflow."

I love the idea of zilbaldoni. The marmot is a zibaldoni. My Apple Notes are a zibaldoni. Zibaldoni is a centuries old practice. Read the chapter on Leonardo DaVinci's notebooks. Are your notes "disorganized"? You'll feel better.

We're not supposed to compare ourselves to others, and I try not to. But I see all this bullshit about PKM and "the graph," and so on and I feel mildly deficient somehow.

Then I read The Notebook.

And I feel great.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:11 Saturday, 23 December 2023