Lotus Agenda was an interesting program that you could use for organizing research notes, tracking expenses, scheduling appointments, and the like. It gave birth to the “Personal Information Management” or “PIM” category of software, but it's more flexible than the other programs in that category.
An unusual thing about Agenda is that it mostly managed text, but at an intermediate granularity, roughly the granularity of a sentence. Each “item” was categorized into some set of “categories”, which were like tags, but were mostly implicitly applied based on matching words in the text. The item-category association could have an associated value, sort of like a spreadsheet cell, with items being the rows and categories being the columns.
You could have several different views of your items, selecting which categories you wanted to display as columns, which you wanted to use to divide the view into sections, and which you wanted to add section totals to.
Web browsers allow you to navigate and organize text at the level of pages, while word processors and text editors allow you to navigate and organize text at the level of letters. Agenda was born about the time of Hypercard, long before hypertext became popular, but I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to have a hypertext system that worked at the intermediate level where Agenda did.
The key questions here are: