LotusNotes
18 points by binjip978
18 points by binjip978
I've never used Notes in anger, but I remember it being derided for being buggy and ugly. Yet every time it's mentioned I'm reminded of Damien Katz' classic account of rewriting its core Formula engine while still at Iris:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201109032529/http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html
(the current URL is password protected, hence the archive.org link)
I interned for IBM at the turn of the century. They used lotus notes at the time. I ended up installing Linux on my IBM machine to do what I was doing, and running lotus notes under wine. It worked, but it didn’t really matter, because I never got any useful email whilst I was an intern.
Fast forward 20-ish years and I’m back at IBM, although they don’t use lotus notes anymore, it’s now Office 365. Despite that I do find some surprising parallels with how accessible email is proving to be.
I worked for a service company (2007-2013) and IBM was our major client, we used their notebooks for business trips and used Lotus Notes as well, and I even have vague memories that it even worked under linux.
I worked for Ray Ozzie at Groove, which Microsoft later bought and added to Office. You could really see the family resemblance between Notes and Groove. They were both amazing technologies that users hated, mostly because the apps exposed themselves at the wrong layer of abstraction.
Groove is an interesting connection that I want to get into some time. Lotus Notes has been on my list of topics for a long time, but it's hard to take on the whole "groupware" topic because there are so many strange threads to it. And just Microsoft has about a hundred.
Is Lotus Notes... a strange cousin of Emacs?
The company I worked for 2001-2005 used Lotus Notes. My memory is hazy on whether they migrated to something else before I left- I think so.
My "fondest" memory about Lotus Notes is remembering feeling like an idiot, because I couldn't figure out how to create a mail folder and I had to ask for help.
I think somewhere in the pile of old crap I keep at my parents' is a printed out email from Notes with its distinctive style, with some handwriting from an esteemed colleague.
I chuckle thinking that likely Pine et al. have outlived Lotus Notes, and I suspect many users of terminal-based email clients were told at some point that Notes was the future and they would be left behind.
I worked at Lotus on the original six-person Domino web server team. At the time, Lotus Notes was competing against the growing threat of the web. Our unofficial slogan on the Domino team was, "if we're successful we'll put the whole company out of business!"
In retrospect I gotta wonder if it would have been more successful to give the native Lotus Notes client away for free (and continue charging for the server). That way Lotus might not have had the problem where the web version would, as the article mentions, require everyone to write their custom UIs twice if they wanted them to work on both.
Yup. I remember that line. The company I worked at back then acquired some Notes-centric UI development tool from Lotus called Notes VIP (as part of the IBM acquisition they divested it).
Nice write up! I gotta wonder how often that distributed database corrupted itself, or didn't?
Much of the strangeness of Lotus Notes reflects its origins in PLATO.
Did not know about or expect that connection at all. Very interesting write-up.
My work place got rid of Notes... Two years ago probably?