The Next Frontier

Outlines have been a popular way to organize information on computers for a long time. While the history of outlining software is unclear, a rough timeline is possible.

Probably the first outliner was developed by Doug Engelbart, as part of the Augment system in the 1960s.

Living Videotext, 1981-87, developed several popular outliners for personal computers. They are archived on a UserLand website, outliners.com.

Dave Winer was the first programmer to bring outlining to the desktop for non-programming use.
ThinkTank and MORE were some of his killer applications in their own space, leading to widespread use of the outlining phylosophy.

He wrote or contributed to a number of relevant specifications, including SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS and OPML.

SOAP	Simple Object Access Protocol to let applications exchange information over HTTP.
XML-RPC	A remote procedure call protocol encoded in XML. It became what is now SOAP
OPML	Outline Processor Markup Language is an XML format for outlines
RSS	A family of XML file formats for Web syndication

XML 1.0, the format that OPML is based on, is a recommendation of the W3C.

Frontier, first shipped in 1992, is built around outlining. The text, menu and script editors in Frontier are outliners, as is the object database browser.
A high performance Web content management, object database, system-level and Internet scripting environment, including source code editing and debugging.
Dave Winner explained the rationale for releasing Frontier as open source on Scripting News on May 17, 2004.

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Frontier Kernel
Developing the Frontier kernel in the 21st Century