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Thank you. We were very fortunate to have had the opportunity in 1984 to incorporate many concepts that seem to have withstood the test of time - a NOSQL db, ma
by rozzie 8y ago
Thank you. We were very fortunate to have had the opportunity in 1984 to incorporate many concepts that seem to have withstood the test of time - a NOSQL db, masterless dB replication, end-to-end encryption, decentralized federated PKI, pure functional query/form language, etc.
Especially proud of what the core team of 5 was able to accomplish, with ~3M lines of C operating smoothly (b/e + f/e) within the 250KB working set imposed by the win2 environment of the time.
But you can’t blame the UI on mid 90’s. We very intentionally kept the dev team very small, and yet business reasons we needed to do concurrent UI ports to Windows, Mac, OS/2, OpenLook and Motif.
Instead of scaling the team to do a best of breed native UI for each target, we constrained ourselves to building a “greatest common multiple” portability layer that worked but felt foreign and awkward everywhere.
I still believe that self-imposed prioritization of constrained core team size was right for the time, even in that period of hyper growth, but the entire UI should have been completely revamped when success allowed for it and the team was ultimately scaled up. No excuses for that.
- chiph 8y agoThanks for the reply. I think that a portable UI that gives everyone a native look & feel is still not a solved problem, even today. Regarding your resource constraints - I'm guilty of assuming that it's all IBM's fault because Notes used the OS/2 keyboard shortcuts (they had a name for this standard which I forget). And not that Notes was developed by Iris, which was separate (other than funding) from Lotus. And was a relatively small firm. My apologies.