The
Extreme Geek piece by Cory Doctorow on writing tools reminds me of Jim Coombs's tools. Writers using geek tools to aid the research and composition process. Coomb's tools used
XEDIT under IBM's mainframe VM/CMS operating system. His tools were implemented well before the web and so not much evidence of their existence is easily found today. This period is captured in McCarty's
HUMANIST: Lessons from a Global Electronic Seminar.