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 ended up at IBM around the turn of the century. They bought Lotus and I was brought on to write lotus notes applications.

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.

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

I joined a company in 2025 an since then I am tasked with porting all Lotus Notes databases to the web (spa+restapi). Funny to see all the comments living in the past as its so present to me.

In my experience working with Notes over many years, it was a neat architecture let down by client UI that did not meet the expectations of users who also used, for example, MS Office apps. Often, they were cosmetic things. But Notes enabled workflow applications like email on steroids; Microsoft leveraged all it could to displace Notes with Exchange and SharePoint, both IMO technically not as good as Notes in many areas, but the Outlook UI was much better than the Notes client for email, and together with the marketing push, client-side Notes was finished. Domino could perhaps have survived, but it needed more than the anaemic LotusScript and formula language to get support from developers, and that never happened.

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)

I worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s. It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky. Fat clients that stored tons of data locally weren’t the thing anymore.

When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.

> 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 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.

This looks like the Lisp Curse

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.

They turned it into a horrible terrible email client.

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

I see lots of em dash in this article.

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...