5 ms·

I wonder what they used instead of outlook

tablespoon 4y ago
> I wonder what they used instead of outlook Maybe something like Pine? Even into Web 1.0 days, it was still pretty common for people to use. Everyone in my high school accessed their school-provided email account by telnetting into a Unix server and accessing Pine via a menu system.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Ah that brings back memories.
- technicalbard 4y ago
  I used elm before pine, on a terminal hooked to a Bull-Honeywell machine running Multics...
unixhero 4y ago
Well Lotus had email at one point. But before it did, Unix sendmail!
- skissane 4y ago
  WordPerfect had email too. Novell bought GroupWise from WordPerfect. Before the Novell acquisition, it was called WordPerfect Office, and before that WordPerfect Library. It was available for DOS, Windows, Mac, UNIX (SCO Xenix, AT&T 3B2, NCR TOWER), OS/2, VAX/VMS, and Data General minicomputers. Confusingly, Corel now sells "WordPerfect Office" which is nothing to do with the original WordPerfect Office. The current "WordPerfect Office" is an office suite composed of WordPerfect (word processor), Quattro Pro (spreadsheet, acquired from Borland), and a few other apps. The original "WordPerfect Office" was not an office suite, it was a groupware suite, with email, calendaring, document management, etc. And GroupWise is still around, but now called Micro Focus GroupWise, since Attachmate bought Novell and then Micro Focus bought Attachmate. And more recently, Micro Focus has been bought by OpenText. I wonder how many people still use it though. I remember when everybody was jumping ship from GroupWise – 15+ years ago. If everyone was abandoning something 15 years ago, who is left today? Addendum: Someone on Reddit claims [0] there is only one large GroupWise customer remaining – US Federal Bureau of Prisons. If true, makes sense – where else but some government agency would something like this survive? [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/tlwvsd/anyone_else_still_using_groupwise/i1w237q/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/tlwvsd/anyone_els...
  - themadturk 4y ago
    Groupwise was considered a miracle at a law firm I worked for in the 1990s. We managed to link three offices together, the main office dialing up each of the branches once an hour to exchange email and documents over 9600k modems.
  - jll29 4y ago
    > Someone on Reddit claims [0] there is only one large GroupWise customer remaining – US Federal Bureau of Prisons. You mean they have a case of vendor lock-in?
    - skissane 4y ago
      I really doubt that vendor lock-in is the reason in their case. Heaps of other organisations - including many not particularly competent public sector ones - managed to do it. Back when everyone was doing it (15-20 years ago), there was a whole cottage industry of consulting firms specialising in Novell-to-Microsoft migrations. So long as you were willing to spend sufficient $$$, and had sufficient executive buy-in, you really couldn’t go wrong. I suspect in their case the real answer must be either (1) unwilling to spend enough to successfully pull it off; or (2) never made it a priority at a sufficiently senior level (or both) Lotus Notes came with a comprehensive development environment for custom applications - much easier to get locked-in there. GroupWise was much more spartan in its feature set, just email and calendar. It had an API but few customers ever wrote code against it - it was primarily used by third-party vendors for integration with document management systems, anti-spam/anti-virus, email archival, eDiscovery, identity management, etc - back in the day, most of the big enterprise offerings in those spaces had plugins for GroupWise. But sooner or later they almost all had plugins for Exchange too - so very rarely would that be a blocker on migrating GroupWise to Exchange And being hooked on Microsoft might not be the best place to be-but still better than stranded on a dying platform. At least Microsoft has a clear roadmap to move to cloud (if that’s what you want to do), By the time cloud became a thing, GroupWise’s remaining install base was too small to support that
      - JSR_FDED 4y ago
rollthehard6 4y ago
Before Outlook there were many, many options, which is kind of the point. You might be intrigued by something like All-In-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL-IN-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL-IN-1 My own first email client was VMS Mail at uni in 1988, then pine when I started to use SunOS and Solaris every day for work. Lotus Notes was very big for a while too before the web killed it off.
- skissane 4y ago
  > Lotus Notes was very big for a while too before the web killed it off. I think the architecture of Notes/Domino was technically very interesting - a rapid application development environment incorporating a replicated document-oriented database, cross-platform GUI forms designer, and scripting language. And then that environment was used to build an email and calendaring application. Some customers bought it just for email and calendar, and ignored its potential as a platform for custom applications. Others used its application development features heavily. But I think part of its decline was that its potential as an application development environment/platform never received enough emphasis from IBM. IBM bought it for the email and calendaring - their mainframe-based groupware line (OfficeVision, PROFS, DISOSS, SNADS, etc) was really showing its age, and buying Lotus was their answer to that business problem. And that’s how they positioned it in the market, and that became the focus of their R&D investment. I remember people used to complain about how the Notes email UI was confusing - due to its cross-platform heritage, it didn’t use the same keyboard shortcuts as Microsoft apps, for example. (Something I believe they improved in newer versions.) Yet underneath that email client lay something powerful that its competitors (primarily Exchange and GroupWise) completely lacked I wonder what might have been, if IBM had positioned it more heavily as a platform for applications rather than just email+calendar - or if it had ended up with someone other than IBM? IBM didn’t really need an application platform because they already owned plenty (WebSphere, CICS, IMS, TPF, AS/400, VisualAge, Informix-4GL, Rational, SAA ADCycle, Cross System Product, UniData/UniVerse, EGL, PowerHouse 4GL, etc). Maybe it would have gone better with a company for whom it was their sole or primary application platform instead of just one among many? I’ve heard some suggestions that now HCL has bought it, they have a renewed interest in using it as an application platform compared to what IBM had. Even if that’s true, probably too late to make much of a difference-there are so many other options nowadays, arguably better.

> I wonder what they used instead of outlook Maybe something like Pine? Even into Web 1.0 days, it was still pretty common for people to use. Everyone in my high school accessed their school-provided email account by telnetting into a Unix server and accessing Pine via a menu system.

pjmlp 4y ago
Ah that brings back memories.
technicalbard 4y ago
I used elm before pine, on a terminal hooked to a Bull-Honeywell machine running Multics...

unixhero 4y ago

Well Lotus had email at one point. But before it did, Unix sendmail!

skissane 4y ago
WordPerfect had email too. Novell bought GroupWise from WordPerfect. Before the Novell acquisition, it was called WordPerfect Office, and before that WordPerfect Library. It was available for DOS, Windows, Mac, UNIX (SCO Xenix, AT&T 3B2, NCR TOWER), OS/2, VAX/VMS, and Data General minicomputers. Confusingly, Corel now sells "WordPerfect Office" which is nothing to do with the original WordPerfect Office. The current "WordPerfect Office" is an office suite composed of WordPerfect (word processor), Quattro Pro (spreadsheet, acquired from Borland), and a few other apps. The original "WordPerfect Office" was not an office suite, it was a groupware suite, with email, calendaring, document management, etc. And GroupWise is still around, but now called Micro Focus GroupWise, since Attachmate bought Novell and then Micro Focus bought Attachmate. And more recently, Micro Focus has been bought by OpenText. I wonder how many people still use it though. I remember when everybody was jumping ship from GroupWise – 15+ years ago. If everyone was abandoning something 15 years ago, who is left today? Addendum: Someone on Reddit claims [0] there is only one large GroupWise customer remaining – US Federal Bureau of Prisons. If true, makes sense – where else but some government agency would something like this survive? [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/tlwvsd/anyone_else_still_using_groupwise/i1w237q/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/tlwvsd/anyone_els...
- themadturk 4y ago
  Groupwise was considered a miracle at a law firm I worked for in the 1990s. We managed to link three offices together, the main office dialing up each of the branches once an hour to exchange email and documents over 9600k modems.
- jll29 4y ago
  > Someone on Reddit claims [0] there is only one large GroupWise customer remaining – US Federal Bureau of Prisons. You mean they have a case of vendor lock-in?
  - skissane 4y ago
    I really doubt that vendor lock-in is the reason in their case. Heaps of other organisations - including many not particularly competent public sector ones - managed to do it. Back when everyone was doing it (15-20 years ago), there was a whole cottage industry of consulting firms specialising in Novell-to-Microsoft migrations. So long as you were willing to spend sufficient $$$, and had sufficient executive buy-in, you really couldn’t go wrong. I suspect in their case the real answer must be either (1) unwilling to spend enough to successfully pull it off; or (2) never made it a priority at a sufficiently senior level (or both) Lotus Notes came with a comprehensive development environment for custom applications - much easier to get locked-in there. GroupWise was much more spartan in its feature set, just email and calendar. It had an API but few customers ever wrote code against it - it was primarily used by third-party vendors for integration with document management systems, anti-spam/anti-virus, email archival, eDiscovery, identity management, etc - back in the day, most of the big enterprise offerings in those spaces had plugins for GroupWise. But sooner or later they almost all had plugins for Exchange too - so very rarely would that be a blocker on migrating GroupWise to Exchange And being hooked on Microsoft might not be the best place to be-but still better than stranded on a dying platform. At least Microsoft has a clear roadmap to move to cloud (if that’s what you want to do), By the time cloud became a thing, GroupWise’s remaining install base was too small to support that
    - JSR_FDED 4y ago

rollthehard6 4y ago

Before Outlook there were many, many options, which is kind of the point. You might be intrigued by something like All-In-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL-IN-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL-IN-1 My own first email client was VMS Mail at uni in 1988, then pine when I started to use SunOS and Solaris every day for work. Lotus Notes was very big for a while too before the web killed it off.

skissane 4y ago
> Lotus Notes was very big for a while too before the web killed it off. I think the architecture of Notes/Domino was technically very interesting - a rapid application development environment incorporating a replicated document-oriented database, cross-platform GUI forms designer, and scripting language. And then that environment was used to build an email and calendaring application. Some customers bought it just for email and calendar, and ignored its potential as a platform for custom applications. Others used its application development features heavily. But I think part of its decline was that its potential as an application development environment/platform never received enough emphasis from IBM. IBM bought it for the email and calendaring - their mainframe-based groupware line (OfficeVision, PROFS, DISOSS, SNADS, etc) was really showing its age, and buying Lotus was their answer to that business problem. And that’s how they positioned it in the market, and that became the focus of their R&D investment. I remember people used to complain about how the Notes email UI was confusing - due to its cross-platform heritage, it didn’t use the same keyboard shortcuts as Microsoft apps, for example. (Something I believe they improved in newer versions.) Yet underneath that email client lay something powerful that its competitors (primarily Exchange and GroupWise) completely lacked I wonder what might have been, if IBM had positioned it more heavily as a platform for applications rather than just email+calendar - or if it had ended up with someone other than IBM? IBM didn’t really need an application platform because they already owned plenty (WebSphere, CICS, IMS, TPF, AS/400, VisualAge, Informix-4GL, Rational, SAA ADCycle, Cross System Product, UniData/UniVerse, EGL, PowerHouse 4GL, etc). Maybe it would have gone better with a company for whom it was their sole or primary application platform instead of just one among many? I’ve heard some suggestions that now HCL has bought it, they have a renewed interest in using it as an application platform compared to what IBM had. Even if that’s true, probably too late to make much of a difference-there are so many other options nowadays, arguably better.