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.