Jesse can speak to that, and while we did take a look at org-mode, I believe it was much later on. One of Jesse’s main inspirations was the Canon cat (ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/misc/jef_raskin/DTCJefRaskinDoc060.pdf) IIRC. Also, FoldingText was developed as the next generation platform which could be used to develop other text based applications, like TaskPaper by modifying the parser and other simple tweaks. So, in some ways it was the logical successor of TaskPaper.