https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nota_Bene_(word_processor)
Nota Bene is an integrated suite of applications for writers and scholars. It operates on the Windows platform and comes in two major versions: Scholar's Workstation, and Lingua Workstation.
Both versions include:
The Scholar’s and Lingua workstations are in most respects identical, except that the Lingua version is fully functional in a number of non-Western languages and alphabets. [see below]
Nota Bene (NB) began as a DOS program in 1982, built on the engine of the word processor XyWrite. Its creator, Steven Siebert, then a doctoral student in philosophy and religious studies at Yale, used a PC to take reading notes, but had no easy computer-based mechanism for searching through them, or for finding relationships and connections in the material. He wanted a word processor with an integrated ‘textbase’, to automate finding text with Boolean searches, and an integrated bibliographical database that would automate the process of entering repeat citations correctly, and be easy to change for submission to publishers with different style-manual requirements.[1]
Siebert licensed XyWrite code from the XyQuest company, and built his programs on it: the word processor Nota Bene, with its textbase Orbis (then called Textbase), and its bibliographical database Ibidem (then called Ibid). He founded Dragonfly Software to market it. He first showed Nota Bene at the MLA convention of December 1982. Version 1 is dated 1983, and version 2, 1986. Version 3.0 came out in 1988, version 4.0 in 1992, and version 4.5 in 1995. Version 4.5 was the last NB DOS version.
Nota Bene 5.0 was the first Windows version. It was shown in pre-release in November 1998, at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. Scholar's Workstation 5.0 was formally released in 1999, and Lingua Workstation 5.0 in 2000. Nota Bene for Windows suite retained and refined Ibidem, Orbis, and the XyWrite-based programming language XPL.
Version 6.0 appeared in 2002, version 7.0 in 2003, version 8.0 in 2006, and version 9.0 in 2010. Version 10 was released in September 2014 and version 11.5 was released in June 2016.
Version 10 (the latest version is 11.5) is fully 32-bit and has an updated look that includes the option to display customized toolbars and dialog bars that take advantage of the added screen real estate provided by high-resolution screens. Nota Bene's primary clientele is academics in the humanities and social sciences, writers and lawyers—people who write books and articles that depend on scholarly resources and research.
They can present documents using a predefined academic style (such as the Chicago Manual of Style or the American Psychological Association), or a customized style. Documents and their entire scholarly apparatus can be quickly changed from one style to another.
Nota Bene contains the usual features of contemporary word processors, such as templates, spell-checking, change-tracking, outlining and hyperlinking. In addition, it provides three independent sets of footnotes/endnotes, the capacity to insert boilerplate from "phrase libraries," the means of generating indexes, tables of contents and cross-references, and tools designed to handle book-length manuscripts
Documents can be saved with the .nb extension; with a user-chosen extension (e.g., .txt, or .2010). They can be imported from and exported into most major word-processing programs via NB’s RTF filters.
Up to 36 files can be open at once in the same NB window. All open documents can be saved with one keystroke. A group of documents can be logged at program shutdown, then re-opened exactly as they were. Multiple groups of files can be logged for work on different projects.