Slashdot Mirror
Post-It Notes - 25 Years of Hypertext in Paper
RexDart writes "A Minneapolis/St. Paul magazine, The Rake, has a fascinating article revealing the history and development of the humble, ubiquitous Post-It Note. An intriguing tale of a dedicated visionary working the system to bring an innovative product to life in a monolithic, tradition-bound organization." From the article: "Two and a half decades later, as the little yellow notes celebrate their silver anniversary, it's easy to forget what a recent innovation they are. Thanks to their material simplicity, they seem more closely related to workplace antiquities like the stapler and the hole-punch than integrated chips. Instead, they're an exemplary product of their time. Foreshadowing the web, they offered an easy way to link one piece of information to another in a precisely contextual way. Foreshadowing email, they made informal, asynchronous communication with your co-workers a major part of modern office life."
Its amazing what somebody saw in something no one else saw a use for.
p
the saying 'someone's junk is another's treasure' comes to mind.
http://www.snopes.com/business/origins/post-it.as
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
Despite common belief, e-mail actually pre-dates the Internet; in fact, existing e-mail systems were a crucial tool in creating the Internet.
Email originated before I was born, and I'm old enough to remember the introduction of the Post-It.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
You realise that before post-it notes, people would simply use a sheet of paper and some duct tape or a bloody paper-clip? (the non virtual, non annoying kind). The brilliant idea of post-it notes was to have pre-cut, pre-glued paper notes. Claiming that post-it notes are ancestors of hyper-links is like saying that the red pen used by teachers is the ancestor of versioning systems...
That doesn't mean that they were present in the average office. A networked computer on every desk became common much later.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Seems someone tried to mark this anniversary by selling a post-it note on eBay UK. Bids got upto £1.8 million, but then that bid was retracted. I managed to get a screenshot of it. See the screenshot here
If Carling made signatures they would be the best signatures in the world...
Well it does sound a little over the top... not because it's bad policy but more because I don't think it guarantees that one note from a very important customer still won't get lost somehow. I probably have a couple thousand "notes to self" in the form of text files laying around and I'm sure some of those are lost.
Chaos is chaos, and better tools probably just provide better chaos. And more expensive chaos. Wish I had an ultimate solution to suggest, but I've seen many sophisticated environments (e.g., Lotus Notes, PM tools, etc.) and not one has solved the "lost note" problem. Sigh.
It's called "Rubber Cement." We've been doing this for decades before the Post-It adhesive. Works just fine.
KFG
This is just another serving of the kind of corporatized "news" that litters our media environment. Obviously written by PR flacks at 3M, headquartered not surpisingly in the same town that the originating newspaper comes from, the only purpose of this article is to sell more product. Never mind the article being factually incorrect -- email goes back to the 60s -- this is the sort of advertisement that passes for actual news everywhere these days.
I avoid traditional media to get away from this self-serving crap. Why does Slashdot have to propagate it?
Paper hypertext indeed.