Backpack

» see backpackit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i knew 37signals before i knew backpack. everybody who touched ruby on rails did, because rails came out of that company, extracted from the code behind basecamp. so the name carried weight with engineers long before you looked at any single product they shipped. backpack was one of those products, launched in 2005 as a personal organizer that lived in your browser.

the idea was a calm home page for your own life. you made a page, kept notes and to-do lists on it, and shared it if you wanted. it was part of the wave of clean, opinionated web apps that 37signals used to argue that software could be simple on purpose. for a few years in the mid 2000s that argument was close to a movement.

then 37signals did the thing it preached and cut. it decided it could not do right by all of its products at once, so in 2012 it stopped taking new backpack customers and folded the best of it into a rebuilt basecamp. existing accounts were left running for years, a legacy product on life support rather than a clean shutdown. in 2014 the company even renamed itself basecamp, which told you exactly which child had survived.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it argued ~

backpack mattered less as a tool than as a position. 37signals used it and its siblings to make a loud case that most software was bloated by features nobody used, and that a small opinionated app could beat a big one. a lot of what web apps later took for granted, the clean defaults and the say-no-to-features discipline, came out of that noise. burying backpack did not bury the argument.

~ why i never signed up ~

i respected the company and never actually used backpack. by the time it existed i was a student and then an engineer who kept his own notes in text files and code, not in a hosted organizer i paid a us company for. it was also squarely an anglophone web-worker tool, the kind of thing that spread through american startup blogs i read but did not live inside. i took the ideas from 37signals. i just never took the products.

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