3 ms·

Even for me as a millennial, IBM is something of a history note. Yes, I know them from computing history lectures, and I liked their ThinkPads (but they sold t

Even for me as a millennial, IBM is something of a history note. Yes, I know them from computing history lectures, and I liked their ThinkPads (but they sold that to Lenovo when I was in high school). I have only directly interacted with IBM product once, and that was Lotus Notes in one corporation I worked as a tech support in university years. And it was horrible. At university, I thought of IBM as "they do things that are invisible but probably important?", but now I guess they don't do even that.

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Notes interface was crap but it did have some interesting tech. Also it was bought, not originated at ibm. They could have fixed it I suppose.
- alblue 5y ago
  Not really. Lotus Notes was an MS-Access system that would attempt to do database synchronization between a server copy of the database and the local client. It was built in an age where road warriors were expected to take their laptops with them, be able to enter sales data, then have that automatically merged on return to the office. In a dial up age and before wifi, this gave unprecedented tools to those who needed to work away from their desks. The problem was that it has serious scaling issues, and when you move mail to it (and remember it has to do the synchronisation step when you return) it can bog down both the server And the client. It was far less efficient than, say, pop and imap. IBM took a bet that they could make Notes scale to the entire org in the mid-to-late ‘90s, and it took many years to get there and much pain along the way. Any large and crufty system can start to have problems as they grow older but “fixing notes” wasn't a programming issue but a design one. In todays terminology, it would be the equivalent of a replicated/distributed MongoDB with the designated “master” on the server, with a cached full copy of that database on your laptop (which isn't permanently connected), while allowing writes in both partitions (ie sacrificing consistency for availability) and then hoping when you connect it back up again that it can figure out the bidirectional sync and resolve any conflicts that occur. And then on top of that build a mail client which stores one mail message per row (including all attachments) along with status bits (read, important, replied etc) and hope to heck it all works. Lotus Notes “synchronization” was the step you did after docking your thinkpad just before going to get your first coffee of the day, because hopefully the latency would be hidden by the brewing time.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    The it, in "they could have fixed it," was referring to the unique interface of the client. Which I do believe could have been standardized, at least to a larger degree than it was. Sorry you got drawn on a goose chase.
Bombthecat 5y ago
Well, a lot of companies still have old ibm tech they will never ever replace. Or replace them by new ibm tech. And red hat /openshift is huge in germany. Only startups run on k8s... Especially in insurance and banking.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Notes interface was crap but it did have some interesting tech. Also it was bought, not originated at ibm. They could have fixed it I suppose.

alblue 5y ago
Not really. Lotus Notes was an MS-Access system that would attempt to do database synchronization between a server copy of the database and the local client. It was built in an age where road warriors were expected to take their laptops with them, be able to enter sales data, then have that automatically merged on return to the office. In a dial up age and before wifi, this gave unprecedented tools to those who needed to work away from their desks. The problem was that it has serious scaling issues, and when you move mail to it (and remember it has to do the synchronisation step when you return) it can bog down both the server And the client. It was far less efficient than, say, pop and imap. IBM took a bet that they could make Notes scale to the entire org in the mid-to-late ‘90s, and it took many years to get there and much pain along the way. Any large and crufty system can start to have problems as they grow older but “fixing notes” wasn't a programming issue but a design one. In todays terminology, it would be the equivalent of a replicated/distributed MongoDB with the designated “master” on the server, with a cached full copy of that database on your laptop (which isn't permanently connected), while allowing writes in both partitions (ie sacrificing consistency for availability) and then hoping when you connect it back up again that it can figure out the bidirectional sync and resolve any conflicts that occur. And then on top of that build a mail client which stores one mail message per row (including all attachments) along with status bits (read, important, replied etc) and hope to heck it all works. Lotus Notes “synchronization” was the step you did after docking your thinkpad just before going to get your first coffee of the day, because hopefully the latency would be hidden by the brewing time.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  The it, in "they could have fixed it," was referring to the unique interface of the client. Which I do believe could have been standardized, at least to a larger degree than it was. Sorry you got drawn on a goose chase.

Bombthecat 5y ago

Well, a lot of companies still have old ibm tech they will never ever replace. Or replace them by new ibm tech. And red hat /openshift is huge in germany. Only startups run on k8s... Especially in insurance and banking.