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 guess Lotus/IBM decided to stop upgrading Lotus Notes as computer limits were increased.
Obligatory Damien Katz Lotus Notes Formula Engine Rewrite (it is a great story but also shows the limits the original devs had to deal with; n.b. scroll down to read Ray Ozzie's comment): see https://web.archive.org/web/20050110035626/http://damienkatz...
So having a limit of 64GB per file doesn't sound so bad.
It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export.
Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems.
It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox.
Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes.
The web did many things better than notes there much much overlap.
The UI was clunky in some ways.
Some of the concepts like replication were just too much too early for many people to grasp.
SQL rose in the corporate world chipping away further at notes.
The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too.
Unstructured document databases were very polarizing sine people hated them with a passion.
The parent company Lotus main product 1-2-3 which ad dominated the spreadsheet world got smashed by Excel.
There’s more reasons too but there’s enough there you can see the doom of Notes.
IIRC LotusScript was basically VB but with a different object model. Why was it a dead end?
Back then a lot of software particularly in the windows world wasn’t very good at talking to anything else. Today everything talks to everything.
Notes already had so many problems it was sunk and lotuscript which as you say was like script. Good but not enough to stop the titanic hitting the iceberg.
Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.
In the beginning, the fact that MS Office was proprietary had nothing to do with communication protocols, but only with the file formats.
The need to convert between proprietary file formats had always existed in an enterprise setting, which is why all such products, including MS Office, had extensive support for importing the file formats of their competitors, so this was never a serious obstacle for adoption.
- incoming e-mails are categorized by organization sending/topic (until a project can be associated)
- all attachments are stripped off and stored on the server using a hierarchy which the recipient is prompted to update
- outgoing e-mails are treated in the same fashion in reverse, so a link to a file on a server is moved to the CMS and then included as a clickable link
(probably employees would have to have a separate company-sponsored e-mail for insurance correspondence)
Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
From a technical point of view one of the bonuses I saw was that it used PKI throughout for encryption and such, which very little other software did. Though this was also clunky at times especially for non-technical users (has anyone ever made the use of PKI a smooth process for those who don't care to know the details?). Proper ACL management too rather than more simplistic permissions, but again this could be very clunky.
Though I'm not sure why we are talking entirely in the past tense, while Domino & Notes are not widely used anymore, they are still out there and developed (under the name HLC Notes) with the last release (adding LLM based “AI” features, of course…) was Jun last year and a bugfix update a few months later. My experience with Domino/Notes was in the 00s and early 10s when I was the accidental admin (the only guy who really understood it left) of a mail and document server based on it, hopefully the clunkiness complaints at least have been addressed since then.
Whereas many Notes applications were internal so there was no "survival of the fittest" and the UI toolkit was passable at best. As a result, many Notes users never experienced a well-designed Notes app.
Ahm, it didn't. I mean, yes it is actively dying but not quite there yet. In fact, where I work we still make good revenue offering consulting and even products for LND. I think this part at the end of the article sums it up well:
> Lotus Notes is now HCL Notes, and as far as I can tell HCL intends to just enjoy the revenue as long as legacy customers will pay them to keep Notes running.
Yes, there are, and I dare say, a lot of legacy customers still paying for LND. So it is dying, but not as fast as people tend to think.
edit: typos
I’ve seen Notes 3 clients and servers on the usual abandonware sites, but never any pre-3.x version
Each note was just a record, but with no schema. Schemas were imposed at the UI layer by forms and at indexing time by views.
However, even with a mind towards efficiency and minimalism, performance at roughly hundreds of thousands of documents was extremely elusive.
Among other things I wrote a batch converter from the XML based export format to PDF files packaged according to a standard for digital archives, and we brought on a specialised consultant to help us out inventing an export for system logs.
I expect there to be many products still out there that are actually built on but not advertised as LotusNotes, waiting for someone like me to come along and figure out how to decommission them. As a RAD platform Notes/Domino is apparently highly productive for those that still know how to do it.
> 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.goodreads.com/quotes/398754-it-is-perfectly-okay...
If you're referring to the sandboxing / isolation of each app, I agree. Plus, the user can change the app quite easily, so if when they spot a bug, they can tell the agent to fix it (and cross their fingers!).
> ensure that a human developer understands the code before committing
Just to clarify: for Superego's app there's no human developer oversight, though. At least for the ones the user self-creates. Obviously the user will check that the app they just made works, but they might not spot subtle bugs. I employ some strategies to _decrease the likelihood of bugs_ (I wrote a bit about it here https://pscanf.com/s/351/, if you're interested), but of course only formal verification would ensure there aren't any.
Yeah, I can see that one is on their own recognizance when letting an LLM run unsupervised.
https://youtu.be/vB3xo2qn_g4?si=y2udkdfezSR9ktUO
Pretty cool!
That's something I miss with Notion. I basically want a Notion but extensible and malleable like Emacs.
The name gives a weird vibe. But, it's free and it's your project so, whatever. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
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.
Their developers moved thru the organization over a period of years making Notes databases out of every paper form-based workflow process they could get their hands on. I lost touch with them and they were acquired by another company, ultimately. I'd love to know what happened to all those custom applications living in Notes. It's hard to think of a platform that could have easily replaced it-- particularly the offline sync / local first portion.
The future, and mainly from the past: In the literal sense, it was derived from a mainframe application -- but above all, it carried with it that anti-personal centralised philosophy.
But yeah, from the future too: That's where we are (and have been for a good while now) headed back to, with all this "cloud"[1] stuff. The erstwhile PC is well on its way to becoming just a terminal again.
___
[1]: There is no "cloud"; it's just other people's computers.
Lotus Notes Supported Formulas, LotusScript and Java.
Based on that, I absolutely disagree with your take on the UI: It was slow, clunky, ugly, and confusing. That was probably a (the) large(st) reason why they switched to MS Outlook.
If that was the period UI you meant, you're just wrong. Either you must have meant something newer, or you've suffered, what's it called? I think there is a name for the phenomenon, having your expectations lowered to the level of what you're getting.
Also, you didn't mention when you used it. I worked with Lotus Notes from 1995 to 2010, and the experience really depended on the hardware available at the time. Once it was up and running, it performed just fine if you had enough memory. For example, I still have version 8.0.2 (from 2008) on my machine, and it uses roughly 13MB at idle and up to about 50MB depending on installed apps, which isn't much by modern standards. But back in 1995, when 8MB of RAM was common, if Notes took up 6MB, I can see how that would have been a real issue. In my case, my ThinkPad had 32MB, then 64MB, and even 192MB which is the moment I installed Windows 2000.
As for the UI, the email client was highly configurable. Honestly, I don't remember ever thinking that something like Netscape Mail or The Bat looked or any email client that I tried at the time looked better. I didn't use Outlook back then, so I can't compare directly, but if Outlook over the past decade is any indication, Lotus Notes was at least on par, if not better that it.
What's really surprising is that even today, Lotus Notes had features that many modern clients still lack. For example, you could select multiple emails and forward them all together in a single message. Simple, but incredibly useful, and not something you commonly see implemented even now.
For reference, here's what the email client looked like: https://ds-infolib.hcltechsw.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/xpDocVie...
I still don't see how Outlook is better than that.
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)
The article asks “what is notes”. For applications it’s a nosql database with a gui front end. You can make custom applications and share with your team easily. Lotusscript bound it together.
We ported a green screen tracking software (year 2000 was approaching) to Notes and had a bunch of custom Notes applications the department used regularly.
It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.
The email client was just another notes database. I later worked somewhere that had Notes and only used the email.
It was SO fast to write things in Lotus Notes, that is crazy. I did it for 10 years.
It had some limitations, I don't recall them now, but basically you could do almost anything. You had to find a way.
But it was FAST to develop. It was crazy.
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.
If Domino was solid, I'd imagine Domino on AS/400 was near unstoppable.
Nope it was on good old winNT 4
I think we may have upgraded it to windows server 2000 at one point as well.
I remember that the disk partition it ran on ran out of disk space once.. it kept ticking along. just didnt let users make changes. Amazing stuff.
PLATO ran its own programming language - TUTOR - which was designed specifically for creating interactive lessons on the system in 1967.
It's one of the earliest examples of a domain-specific language shaped entirely by its platform. The system also had real-time chat, message boards, and multiplayer games running on shared terminals in the early 1970s — a decade before BBSs went mainstream.
Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.
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.
But IBM targeted companies that techies had heard of, while CA seemed to go after only enterprise software that ran in the backoffice.
Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.
Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.