If you're ever interested in the history of note-taking systems and want to go down a rabbit-hole of sorts, I suggest starting with the Wikipedia page of
Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann, who died in 1998, is well-known for his ground-breaking thinking in systems theory as well as originating a note-taking system that in many ways—either directly or indirectly—serves as inspiration for many of the note-taking systems, knowledge bases, and similar software that exist today.
Luhmann's note-taking system was referred to as
Zettelkasten, which is a German word that means "slip box". As Wikipedia explains:
"A Zettelkasten or card file consists of small items of information stored on paper slips or cards that may be linked to each other through subject headings or other metadata such as numbers and tags."
Sound familiar? Conceptually, that's pretty much how a lot of electronic knowledge base systems work: bits of information that are linked via other smaller bits of information.
Interestingly, after explaining a little more about how the system has been used in personal knowledge management, the article says:
"The system not only allows a researcher to store and retrieve information related to their research, but has also long been used to enhance creativity."
I just found it fascinating that it mentions creativity (which we might not immediately correlate with these systems) along with organization and research (which we might naturally associate with these kinds of systems).
As for Luhmann himself, his biography says he built up a Zettelkasten of around 90,000 index cards for his research, and credited this with making his extraordinarily prolific writing possible. His works were digitized and made available
online in 2019.
Like I said, his main Wikipedia page has quite a few links you can branch off to in order to understand more about his work and how it relates to modern-day systems.
