Ever get wistful over some DOS program? I’m part of a loyal crowd that is still using Lotus Agenda, the legendary PIM (personal information manager) that was a personal project of Lotus co-founder Mitch Kapor. You can also see Bob Newell’s page of “Agendabilia” (just coined here in honor of the occasion). His site includes the draft text of the review by James Fallows from the May 1992 issue of The Atlantic [see Addendum #3 below], still a revered document among those of us in what Fallows referred to in a long-ago email as “the Agenda bund.”
Yesterday, as I was making a copy of my planner.ag file, I noticed on the Windows Explorer screen of my PC that it had updated on 8/16/2010, but that almost all of the other files in the APPS directory were last modified on 8/17/1990. That meant that tomorrow — now today, at least for another 15 minutes or so in the EDT zone of the Eastern US — is the 20th birthday of (at least my copy of) Agenda 2.0.
Happy birthday, faithful companion, even as we now contemplate a move to running you in a DOS window, under Windows XP, under Parallels 5.0, on a MacBook Pro with 8 GB of memory running OS X. None of which — especially the 8 gigs of memory — either you or I could have anticipated or even grasped when you were born, or should that be burned?
Addendum (8/18/10): For those of you, like me, who assume that Agenda will never pass this way again, especially given the glacial pace of Chandler, despite Mitch Kapor’s initial efforts, well, there is the faintest glimmer of a hint. Or at least there is Tom Berend, a retired engineer in Toronto, whose blog title hints at what we want to hear: Lotus Agenda Rewrite. Really? One guy, on his own, a few hours a day? And as a Web app at that. Stranger things have happened. And besides, he captured the spirit of Agenda better than anyone else: “…it still amazes me how agile, how PERFECT it is.” Just so.
Addendum #2 (4/8/12): Alas, very late last year, Tom Berend (see first addendum, above) put Lotus Agenda Rewrite on hold. As I read his post, probably on deep hold. As nice as Agenda redux would have been, you can’t fault his arguments.
Addendum #3 (4/8/12): Amazingly, about a month ago in sorting through some old file folders, I found the tear sheets of James Fallows’ review from the May 1992 issue of The Atlantic. For those of you who want the final word, as opposed to the draft text mentioned in the opening paragraph (above), here are the four original pages in all their edge-to-edge glory.
Thanks for pointing this out, I didn’t realize such a milestone was reached. I continue my interest in Agenda, running with DosBox on a Linux system. Now who would ever have anticipated that?
Thanks for the ‘call out’.
I’m progressing slowly on the agenda rewrite, but with increasing urgency. I have returned to university as a student, and my ‘use case’ for my version of agenda is organizing the sources for my thesis. It has some interesting challenges.
I continue to be in awe of the elegance and skill of the programmer(s) who put together the original Agenda.
I have been remiss in posting progress on my blog, will get to it again.
Tom
Hi!
Nice to see that others too still use Lotus Agenda. Alas I made an big error when I once borrowed the manuals: I did not copy the chapters about macros, about STF format, and TXT2STF details. So I may use Lotus Agenda only interactive. Scanns of the manuals had been online some days in 2005 I found out today – who may give me a hint where to find the scanns today? Please!
TIA…..Mike
I feel right at home here! Agenda users today! I have two books from yesteryears. Let me find the time to scan the stf and txt2stf stuff and get back here. Now my question: how can you run it well in XP natively? I don’t want to continue with VM.
Glad to see there are still some Agenda fans out there. I was the international product marketing manager for Agenda. I liked the product so much I left Lotus International to go write an Agenda add-on called “Itemize!”. I even did a deal with Lotus International to put my leaflet in the Agenda box! It was also marketed in the U.S. through Bob & lauren Flast’s AgendaWare company.
I had some success with it (did anyone ever hear of it?) but not quite enough to retire on
It was properly published – nice brochure, manual, cover, etc. If anyone’s got a floppy disk reader I’d be willing to contribute it for free. It allows you to import just about anything into Agenda.
On another note, I keep hearing about plans to resurrect Agenda. I wish! It was the most useful program I’ve ever encountered. For me, it was all about categorisation; the PIM aspects were of minor interest. When I saw Chandler I was so disappointed – it was all PIM and no Agenda. Does anyone know of a true Agenda-like product out there? I’d be so grateful to find one.
How true… a glance at the directory listing caused a momentary sense of deja-vue, as it looks very much like my (and, no doubt, other users’) apps directories…whoever does get to port Agenda onto Windows, please, please, just get the basic engine over (with the Categories, auto-matching, multiple views etc. ) with a few printer drivers, and leave the rest (email, web publishing, etc) for later versions…wonder why Chandler tried too hard …
Nice to see others still enamored by the Lotus Agenda application. I am so old that I haven’t contracted the word to just ‘app’ quite yet.
Like others, I have hoped for a modernized version of Agenda and hoped that Kapoor’s Chandler would be it, but the betas never seemed anything at all like the original.
I have, however, found a very similar look, feel and approach within the OmniFocus, from Omnigroup, application through it’s contexts and perspectives views.
I hope that I can find a good DOS box running a 286 and MSDOS 4.11 to have a nostalgic go with 2.0 one last time.
Happy Birthday Agenda 2.0…Best App Ever!
@Tom McCann – I would be interested in your Agenda add-on called “Itemize!” which imports text into Agenda? Can you email me pujoe1076@gmail.com? Thanks.
@synfluent – Thanks for the on Omnifocus.
I still use Agenda everyday, and keep an aging Thinkpad T30 running Win2K docked for just that purpose. There is nothing as capable and efficient. Files that aren’t enormous can be also be run on the venerable HP200LX, which fits nicely in the pocket.
Your screenshot of the Agenda directory looks rather strange to me. I still use another Lotus software that I think is magnificent (and never equaled): Lotus Magellan. Agenda, Magellan and 123 seemed made for each other.
I have looked at some of the other Agenda like programs like Zoot and Omni, but can’t get beyond the interface. One of the strengths of Agenda is the non graphical interface. We are dealing with words and categories, using the keyboard. A GUI seems counterproductive and slow, to me. Pictures and graphics work well enough in Evernote. I think the latter has developed a clean and relatively efficient GUI.
A couple of side notes:
My Agenda EXE shows 9-03-99. Was that was the last update?
Agenda (and all DOS programs) run very well, with good clipboard support, on Ecomstation, which is a continuation of OS/2. The benefit is that it enables us to keep DOS going on new hardware without using VMs.
Charles Bradley
Hi there,
Believe it or not I still have a printed original copy of “Lotus Agenda; Working with Definition Files”, Release 2.0. Its first edition was printed 1988. Second edition printed 1989. Third edition printed 1990.
The following is the Table of Content of that booklet
Introduction
Chapter 1 Getting Started with Definition Files
Chapter 2 Creating Definition Files
Chapter 3 Using Definition Files
Chapter 4 Patterns
Chapter 5 Definition File Commands
Chapter 6 Converting and Importinf Text
Chapter 7 Debugging a Definition File
Apendix A What’s New in TXT2SFT for Agenda 2.0
Apendix B Structures Files
Apendix C Quick Reference
Index
All in all it has 108 pages. I am willing to scan that precious document in my spare time (which is not that much). I should be must gratefull if this community would suggest me where would it be the right place to post that scanned material as soon as it becomes available, lets say one chapter at a time.
Although it originaly hold a copyright ¿may I asume that it no longer applies? I understand that some time ago Lotus Agenda was released to the public domain.
Excuse my English but I happen to be a venezuelan physician, living in Caracas, Spanish being my mother tongue, happily using Lotus Agenda since 1992!
Best regards. Pablo
Has anyone run Agenda on Psion PDA’s operating system, EPOC?
I started using Agenda with release 1 and still use it daily. It’s hard to believe that nothing has come along to replace it.
Maybe us Agenda lovers are just a very unique group. When it was still on the market I used to try to convince my friends how useful it was and never had much success at that.
@Tom McCann – I would also be interested in your Agenda add-on called “Itemize!”. I had once worked on a script that would read comma delimited files and take the column data for items, notes and categories. I had many uses for this but never got it done. Maybe Itemize does some of these jobs.
I have the original documentation and could scan some of it if there was a place to put it. Any ideas? The macro book and the stf file definitions are the parts that I continue to reference.
Bill
Although Agenda was no real net application, I once made a mill-wide maintenance management and shift-maintenance group failure reporting system for our large paper/board/power-mill combination. Agenda database was in our Novell server and had some 30 users along the LAN. That system served the mill several years and was used also by mill managers because of easy use.
Later Agenda was replaced by an expencive commercial maintenance management system, which was very hard to use and had not by far the properties of Agenda.
Does any one know if it is possible to use Lotus Agenfa on a IPAD2?
I used Agenda happily for well over ten years for my medical studies and research. In Windows, it seemed to run just fine in a DOS window triggered by a properly configured PIF file. But now with Windows 7 and a 64-bit machine, I can’t get it to work.
A 2010 blog describes Agenda running in DOSBox (http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2010/03/lotus-agenda-and-windows-7.html). However, although I can get the program to run, I cannot open my data file — I keep getting told the pathname (with does not include long filenames) does not exist.
** If anyone knows how to open one’s *.ag data file in DOSBox running on Windows 7, I’d be much obliged.
Not much more I can add to the laudatory comments already posted. It’s astonishing to me (a physician) that so much progress in computer science has apparently not produced anything as clever, useful and elegant as Lotus Agenda. Perhaps it was truly a work of genius.
Thanks very much.
hi dar501
you have to ‘mount’ the drive that agenda lives on. when you start dosbox, you get a z: prompt, but files are on your c: or d: drives are not yet accessable. you might have to type
mount c: \agenda (assuming that you have a folder named ‘agenda’ on your c: drive.
this creates a virtual c: drive that lists the files in your agenda directory. you can then change to that drive and start agenda.
if this isn’t clear, or you can’t get it to work, contact me at tom.berend (at) cheeseandcrackers.ca and i’ll try to help you get it working.