Through the late '70s and early '80s I worked in an industrial research lab where technology transfer from lab to product was regularly discussed. I believed engineers were by nature conservative and wouldn't employ technology that they hadn't seen work somewhere else. At one point I set out to chart the historical flow of ideas using hypertext. This ultimately became wiki.
I was familiar with the systematic structure of ideas and the evolutionary processes that require a viable germline for their propagation. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Alexander and George Lakoff provided inspiration.
My one time colleague Kent Beck was working at Apple where the early version of HyperCard called WildCard was in use. I got a copy and studied it. It seemed well suited for modeling the flow of ideas. I wrote a stack to collect interviews.
I imagined three card templates, one each for Person, Project and Idea. Once coded I found one template sufficient where the instances would be distinguished by the title given to a particular card.
I concocted a mechanism for linking to cards not yet written. A long click would create the missing card. I showed this to curious engineers and invited them to describe their more interesting projects and the ideas they had learned there.
I use the same template to model an emerging design and this usage begot class, responsibilities and collaborators (CRC) recorded on physical index cards.
I used the same template again to build a database of frequently asked questions and their systematic solutions for financial software I wrote for a new employer.
After the first PLoP conference in 1994 I agreed to make a pattern repository on the new world-wide web and eventually translated my HyperCard template into a web form application.