> Ecco Pro was originally developed by Pete Polash, who had sold an early Macintosh based presentation program to Aldus and Bob Perez, a Harvard-trained lawyer hired by Apple as a programmer and Evangelist in the 1980s. It was first released in 1993 by Arabesque Software, Inc., based in Bellevue, Washington. PC Magazine awarded ECCO Pro their Editor's Choice award in 1996 and 1997.
> Development by NetManage ceased in 1997 after the July 1997 release of version 4.01. Andrew Brown wrote in The Guardian: "So what happened to the paragon of a program? The market killed it. First it was sold to a much larger company, Netmanage; presumably doing this made the original programmers a lot of money. Then Netmanage panicked when Microsoft Outlook came along as a "free" part of the Office suite, and killed development on the program." NetManage chief executive officer Zvi Alon noted that 'As soon as Microsoft decided to give away Outlook with Office, we started getting phone calls questioning the value of Ecco Pro'.
Ecco was so beloved that it was binary patched to enable Lua scripting, a decade after being killed. It was virtually bug free and continues to work today on Windows, Linux+Wine and macOS+Crossover. It was so well designed that even though it predated the internet, it could be trivially extended to support hyperlinks. The main limitations after 20 years of zero maintenance are max db size and lack of scalable fonts.
In 2023, an open-source PIM inspired by Ecco Pro reached v1.0 status after 14 years, built on Qt with binaries available for Win/Linux/Mac, https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine
CrossLine is an outliner with sophisticated cross-link capabilities in the tradition of the well-respected Ecco Pro. It implements the concept of "Transclusion" proposed by Ted Nelson and - among others - implemented in the legendary Objectory SE tool by Ivar Jacobson. It is also a full text database with built-in search engine.
I've installed CrossLine and read CrossLineDemo.cldb, but can't find anything that might be described as transclusion. The "Transclusion" outline in CrossLineDemo.cldb is just a copy of a Wikipedia page and does not mention CrossLine. Because the outline named "Ecco Pro" says, "Data is stored as discrete objects, and can be dragged as dynamic links to multiple folders creating cross references," I tried in CrossLine to drag an item to a different folder or a different outline, but no joy.
Can someone explain how CrossLine enables transclusion?
> if the outline is in the same repository, CrossLine supports live transclusion, i.e. the transcluded items immediately update when the source is changed; if the outline is in a different repository, the item is pasted as a static link, i.e. the text is pasted and doesn’t change unless you manually change it (CTRL+SHIFT+L). Live transclusion links have a blue background color while static links have normal background, blue font and are underlined.
> Note that there are two ways of transcluding: either as alias items or inlined items. You can create the former by selecting one or more items, then clicking on the handle of the item under which you want the alias, then CTRL+SHIFT+V; the latter are simply created instead by pasting into the text of another item.
"Small law firms" seem to have a history of adopting and hanging on to specific software. IIRC they used Wordperfect for years after Word had taken over almost all other business and personal word processing, because there were so many legal templates for Wordperfect and they didn't want to abandon what was working for them.
If contracts are "code for human behavior", then legal templates are a well-tested code base. Wordperfect had great support for formatting codes. Looks like it's still a feature being developed for lawyers, https://www.wordperfect.com/en/licensing/legal/
> An all-time favorite feature just got even better! Reveal Codes window now displays codes for font attributes and text alignment features in table cells, rows, and columns. In addition, cell and row codes appear before table text in the Reveal Codes window, delivering a clearer picture of what font and alignment formatting has been applied.
Ecco Pro is great for manually linking items in multiple locations within a complex hierarchy, with one change reflected everywhere. Hard to walk away from a well organized database of research or writing.
Fascinating story! I’d love something like this with PDF integration (a file format that has become deeply embedded within all aspects of legal practice).
You mostly had me at "Transclusion" (an unfortunate terminology in retrospect come to think of it, I wish Ted Nelson would offer a substitute term. Hyperthogonal transaction? idk)
Regardless of the social changes in recent decades, I think it is silly to decide to reserve the root "trans-" for a certain group when it has historically had multiple meanings. Correct me if you had some other reason.
> Ecco Pro was originally developed by Pete Polash, who had sold an early Macintosh based presentation program to Aldus and Bob Perez, a Harvard-trained lawyer hired by Apple as a programmer and Evangelist in the 1980s. It was first released in 1993 by Arabesque Software, Inc., based in Bellevue, Washington. PC Magazine awarded ECCO Pro their Editor's Choice award in 1996 and 1997.
> Development by NetManage ceased in 1997 after the July 1997 release of version 4.01. Andrew Brown wrote in The Guardian: "So what happened to the paragon of a program? The market killed it. First it was sold to a much larger company, Netmanage; presumably doing this made the original programmers a lot of money. Then Netmanage panicked when Microsoft Outlook came along as a "free" part of the Office suite, and killed development on the program." NetManage chief executive officer Zvi Alon noted that 'As soon as Microsoft decided to give away Outlook with Office, we started getting phone calls questioning the value of Ecco Pro'.
Ecco was so beloved that it was binary patched to enable Lua scripting, a decade after being killed. It was virtually bug free and continues to work today on Windows, Linux+Wine and macOS+Crossover. It was so well designed that even though it predated the internet, it could be trivially extended to support hyperlinks. The main limitations after 20 years of zero maintenance are max db size and lack of scalable fonts.
In 2023, an open-source PIM inspired by Ecco Pro reached v1.0 status after 14 years, built on Qt with binaries available for Win/Linux/Mac, https://github.com/rochus-keller/CrossLine