"Welcome to InfoLink, the best way to organise your life."
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I recently found one of my first shareware programs, InfoLink, tucked away in a BBS (bulletin board system) archive.
InfoLink was a personal information manager (PIM) - they were all the rage in the early 1990s. It took the hyperlinking ideas that were just being employed by the nascent world-wide-web and let the user build and edit interlinked pages of information. I suppose it would now be called a personal wiki. It distinguished between links for people, places, things and events and had a calendar to show the events. It could call out to external programs to view and edit files or send faxes.
I designed it in 1993 while I was travelling around Europe with work. I wrote it in 1994 using Turbo Pascal, which I'd won in an AI programming competition in a Computer Shopper show in London when I was 18. The indexing in InfoLink was my first implementation of a B-tree.
It still runs (via DOS emulators in Linux for me now), and looks pretty useful I think, even two decades on.
Here's a download of the zipped INFOLINK software. The program executable is 70K.
Here's a shot of the main index page:
And editing it shows the link tags:
See the breadcrumbs in the Route panel, and the lovely drop-shadow!:
I have the source code somewhere on a floppy disk, and the compiler on several 5¼" floppy disks. I think it would be a challenge to build it again.
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