LotusNotes

I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.]

Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.

And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!

In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.

Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.

The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.

I'm building an app that is, in a way, a modern take on Lotus Notes (https://github.com/superegodev/superego), and I couldn't feel this more:

> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.

Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".

But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there can be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.

Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that can be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.

¹ https://www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-software

> Admittedly, IBM buying a popular software product at great expense and running it into the ground is an old story.

IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.

Lotus Domino (the Lotus Notes server) still lives on as HCL Domino: https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/web-servers/hcl-domi...

San Francisco's school board still uses it: https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/Public

(Note the .nsf extension, which signifies a Notes database)

Lotus Notes was astounding when it arrived.

Windows had barely landed. Networking was really only used for file serving in most corporations. There was no email at most companies and TCP/IP was still mostly a university and government thing.

Notes turned up as a deeply sophisticated Windows application, a no-code development environment, document oriented, replicated distributed shared data system with built in security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.

The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.

Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.

At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.

I would rather use LotusNotes again than the modern Microsoft stack.

I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT.

Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all.

Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.

It was bad. There was a dedicated site called lotusnotessucks.com or something like that. It does not exist anymore but here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...