Dbase II and Paradox
were efficient tools, but still I did not get the feeling of flying.Governor Thomas was so pleased with the construction of this stove
. . . that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them
for a term of years; but I declined it from a principle which has ever
weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great
advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an
opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we
should do freely and generously.
— Benjamin Franklin
This program was not born easily. Already back in 1980 I sat with an Apple-II and tried to build something database-like
for my thoughts. (We had to remove the computer's lid, since it became too hot with the extra 128-kilobyte card!)
Over the years, I returned to the mind-as-database problem now and then, but with poor results
Dbase II and Paradox
were efficient tools, but still I did not get the feeling of flying.
Time passed and I moved into Windows, working with “Delphi” from Borland. The Windows interface and programming
tools appearing at this time automatically solved many problems I had struggled with at earlier attempts. In the
summer of 1996, while on a vacation trip to London with my youngest son, I made up my mind about the design.
Being an old-fashioned Web addict, I soon published the work as freeware. After some months, I received enthusiastic
correspondence from Joe Balistocky in California, who praised my program as a tool for stock market analysis. An
undreampt-of development!
I made a version 2 with a tricky system for making graphs on each tiny card in the system. After some time, I found
that I did not like it, and I removed it in version 3.
In May 1999, I did some campaigning. I started a Web ring and I sent a message about this new Web ring to about
200 members of the international linguistics/psychology community, whose home pages seemed to indicate interest
in computers and cognition. I got a few encouraging answers and at least 95% silence.
But I did get a wave of downloads. (Around 1000 within a month.) I built good positions in the search engines,
which I later lost again when I had to change domain from “eax” to “Sommestad”.
Just when I was about complete the new LM 2000, Stephen Prower wrote me. It turns out that he had been a user since
version 3.1. He excels in motorcycle writing, Hume, Popper, Samuel Johnson. And Robotype, Sidekick, DesqView, Win
3.11/Hurricane, PC Outline, Recorder, Improv, and so on. Stephen did great work in LM 2000 testing.
If you look behind the banners at the bottom of the LM 2000 download page,
you find a lot of mind chart and creativity software. I suppose everybody agrees that even a minimal improvement
of productivity in various kinds of intellectual work is a big thing.
Aug 2000
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these other writings in English by the program author, Gunnnar Sommestad:
