Grombles

In 1991 I created the original TABi prototype while working for BMW. Previously I used a day diary to keep notes, thereby having a timeline to assist note retrieval. When my calendar went digital, my notes became sequential, requiring me to recall whether each note I saw was made before or after the one I was searching for. There had to be a better way to find my notes. What was needed was a clue as to what was written on each page. A tab for every page. But ordinary tabs along one edge only gave me a few tabbed pages. I needed to invent a way to have tabs along more edges. So I tried running tabs along the top, the side and the bottom edges. Still not enough tabs. Then I hit on the idea of tiers, effectively multiplying the number of tabs by two or even three. TABi was born and I constructed the prototype you see above. I used it for some time, and liked it, but instead of developing it as a product, I reasoned that all notes would eventually go digital, so abandoned the idea and buil...