7 ms·

LotusNotes

172 points by TMWNN 7mo ago

senectus1 7mo ago
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.
- dharmatech 7mo ago
  What platform did you run Domino on? If Domino was solid, I'd imagine Domino on AS/400 was near unstoppable.
  - senectus1 7mo ago
    I had an AS/400 but unfortunately never got to run it on that. (it was a JD Edwards server for the ERP system) Nope it was on good old winNT 4 I think we may have upgraded it to windows server 2000 at one point as well. I remember that the disk partition it ran on ran out of disk space once.. it kept ticking along. just didnt let users make changes. Amazing stuff.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jasondigitized 7mo ago
    It was. I did some I.T. consulting in the Fortune 500 and a few ran Notes on the AS/400.
  - projektfu 7mo ago
    As a user, we used two Domino servers. One was Windows NT, the other was Linux. The Linux one was incredibly performant compared to the Windows one. I think it was an example of good reimplementation using hindsight.
  - pickle-wizard 7mo ago
    In a past life I was a Domino admin and I ran it on an AS/400. It was great, handled incredible amounts of load, and required little maintenance. The only outage we had was when I accidentally deleted all the databases from the file system. Even that was pretty easy to recover from.
GMoromisato 7mo ago
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.
- dundercoder 7mo ago
  With everything as a note, how was it so performant? How did it scale so well?
  - GMoromisato 7mo ago
    It was basically NoSQL before NoSQL. Each note was just a record, but with no schema. Schemas were imposed at the UI layer by forms and at indexing time by views.
    - boilerupnc 7mo ago
      Related [0] [0]. https://www.wired.com/2012/12/couchdb/ https://www.wired.com/2012/12/couchdb/
  - 7mo ago
cake-rusk 7mo ago
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/guardianweeklytechnologysection https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...
- cake-rusk 7mo ago
  Here's a quote from the article. Hopefully this helps the people with rose tinted glasses get some perspective... >Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?
  - projektfu 7mo ago
    It's like the two types of languages: the ones everybody complains about, and the ones nobody uses.
  - tracker1 7mo ago
    VB6? I mean, you could do some great things with it, and it was pretty easy to do things with. That said, so many people doing things with it didn't really know what they were doing, had no UX understanding and just created slop. I think half the issues people have with AI today are simply because AI has seen just as much slop in the real world as it has "good, clear code."
- jasondigitized 7mo ago
  As a email client.
- slater 7mo ago
  Same. There was a running joke that there's exactly two people who love Lotus Notes: The boss, cos they signed off on it and can never be wrong and it shows commitment to productivity increases and nobody got fired for buying IBM and bla bla bla. The other person was the guy implementing it, cos money, money, money! The boots on the ground cried "ugh, Lotus Notes!" in unison and just had to deal with byzantine key combos, nonstop client crashes/unresponsiveness, and moronic UI decisions some 3-person team made in like 1987. I have opinions.
pscanf 7mo ago
I'm building an app that is, in a way, a modern take on Lotus Notes (https://github.com/superegodev/superego 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 https://www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-software
- dharmatech 7mo ago
  Just watched your demo here: https://youtu.be/vB3xo2qn_g4?si=y2udkdfezSR9ktUO https://youtu.be/vB3xo2qn_g4?si=y2udkdfezSR9ktUO Pretty cool!
  - dharmatech 7mo ago
    I like that you can generate new programs from within the system. That's something I miss with Notion. I basically want a Notion but extensible and malleable like Emacs.
    - pscanf 7mo ago
      Yes! That's more or less the angle I'm going for. I mean, I don't aim just yet for Emacs-levels of malleability, but at least for something where you can create some useful day to day personal tools.
- dharmatech 7mo ago
  Many people seem to associate "ego" with negative connotation. The name gives a weird vibe. But, it's free and it's your project so, whatever. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
andrewstuart 7mo ago
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.
- EvanAnderson 7mo ago
  I did contract work for a company who made heavy investments into Notes-based applications. The replication capability was super cool. We would setup a new client computer on the corporate LAN, synchronize them to the various Notes databases they needed, then send the computer out to field service reps who would use the computers mostly offline. They updated over a pool of dial-up modems at headquarters. They would run mostly overnight, with the field service reps dialing-in before bed and leaving it to run until it automatically disconnected. Later they used a VPN and dial-up ISPs. It worked astoundingly well. Their developers moved thru the organization over a period of years making Notes databases out of every paper form-based workflow process they could get their hands on. I lost touch with them and they were acquired by another company, ultimately. I'd love to know what happened to all those custom applications living in Notes. It's hard to think of a platform that could have easily replaced it-- particularly the offline sync / local first portion.
  - dharmatech 7mo ago
    Love stories like this about bespoke systems that might still be running out there somewhere.
rahimnathwani 7mo ago
Lotus Domino (the Lotus Notes server) still lives on as HCL Domino: https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/web-servers/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 https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/Public (Note the .nsf extension, which signifies a Notes database)
BoredPositron 7mo ago
I would rather use LotusNotes again than the modern Microsoft stack.
- tracker1 7mo ago
  Today's C# isn't bad... assuming you aren't overcomplicating the world through excess abstraction.
zaphod_b 7mo ago
> 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.
- canucker2016 7mo ago
  They took the Computer Associates (CA) playbook and ran with it. But IBM targeted companies that techies had heard of, while CA seemed to go after only enterprise software that ran in the backoffice.
scottmcdot 7mo ago
I see lots of em dash in this article.
- CRConrad 7mo ago
  But fortunately, you're not one of those idiots who immediately jump from that to the conclusion that "This article must be written by an AI!" — right...?
tibbydudeza 7mo ago
They turned it into a horrible terrible email client.
est 7mo ago
This looks like the Lisp Curse
mathattack 7mo ago
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.
vsajip 7mo ago
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.
- nradov 7mo ago
  Later versions of Domino also had full Java support, so you could write applications in that language and just use Domino as a back end database. But you still had to do semi-manual memory management, which made it tough for most Java programmers.
- kwanbix 7mo ago
  I agree with everything but the UI part. I think it was on par with Office. I used both at the same time. This is if you are compering Outlook, the email client, with the email app in Lotus Notes. As Lotus Notes was much more than email client. I was just the other day talking about Lotus Notes and Outlook. Lotus Notes had 3 different ways to look for info, the most powerfull one being indexing the database. My friend was praising how good Notes search was vs Outlook that never seem to find anything. Lotus Notes Supported Formulas, LotusScript and Java.
  - CRConrad 7mo ago
    I've only ever used Notes as a mail client, at a company I did consulting work for decades ago, for most of the 00s. (Yeah, sure, we'd heard that it was more than an email client -- but what did we care, when we didn't use it for anything else?) Based on that, I absolutely disagree with your take on the UI: It was slow, clunky, ugly, and confusing. That was probably a (the) large(st) reason why they switched to MS Outlook. If that was the period UI you meant, you're just wrong. Either you must have meant something newer, or you've suffered, what's it called? I think there is a name for the phenomenon, having your expectations lowered to the level of what you're getting.
acomjean 7mo ago
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.
- tracker1 7mo ago
  Hard to imagine a place adopting Notes and just using the email... email was always kind of a shortcoming in the box. It was there, but wasn't very good imo. I think that Outlook was pretty great up until they started the cloud editions backing M365... I understand why they've changed it how they have, I just think it was better UX for most people before, even if it didn't scale well.
- kwanbix 7mo ago
  You are absolutelly right, it was a NoSQL database with a RAID environment on top. It was SO fast to write things in Lotus Notes, that is crazy. I did it for 10 years. It had some limitations, I don't recall them now, but basically you could do almost anything. You had to find a way. But it was FAST to develop. It was crazy.
_nhh 7mo ago
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.
- tracker1 7mo ago
  I haven't even seen Notes in the wild since around 2008 or so...
maztaim 7mo ago
I had a not great experience with Notes. It was slow and cumbersome. I had become used to Outlook for e-mail, plain simple e-mail. It was fast, light and didn't treat everything as a note. Notes is this heavy app that was slow to load anything with an early 90's aesthetic. I worked for a large financial (~80,000 employees) that decided to move to Notes from in-house exchange servers well after it was obvious Microsoft had won the productivity wars. Rumor mill suggested it was brought in at the direction of a board member who just so happened to have close interests with IBM. It set overall productivity back by at least 5 years before executives were forced to make a very decisive and quick move to O365. The reason given were scalability issues, the overwhelming cost of purchasing P-Series hardware (6-digits for one server) by the rack to keep up with demand along with the cost of developers attempting to make something useful for all of the different business needs. Last I checked they are still stuck with some small, but essential work being diverted through Notes despite the move back to Microsoft.
unfirehose 7mo ago
my favorite part of lotus notes is the password scrambler that prevents people snooping over your shoulder to steal password, I implemented this on my front-end at unsandbox dot com you can test it on teh console page even without an account, the portal itself does not have accounts.
Heer_J 7mo ago
[dead]
baggachipz 7mo ago
My first dev job was a Notes developer. It really was an amazing piece of tech in hindsight. IMO their real folly was chasing the web trend; at its heart it was a groupware product, and they tried to make it be too many things to everybody. I spent most of my time trying to wrestle it into doing things it wasn't meant to do. It got me extremely proficient with LotusScript which led to other opportunities (Hello ASP!) but the whole thing is a shame. Had they stayed in their lane with the product, it might still be alive and widely used today.
- tracker1 7mo ago
  For that matter, had they invested in a web plugin that treated domino as a thin client server, they may also still be around today. Though load balancing would probably take a bit more work.
DaleBiagio 7mo ago
The PLATO connection is the best part of this piece. PLATO ran its own programming language - TUTOR - which was designed specifically for creating interactive lessons on the system in 1967. It's one of the earliest examples of a domain-specific language shaped entirely by its platform. The system also had real-time chat, message boards, and multiplayer games running on shared terminals in the early 1970s — a decade before BBSs went mainstream. Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.
- dolebirchwood 7mo ago
  Fuck off, robot.
  - DaleBiagio 7mo ago
    Calm down dolebirchwood, not a bot
    - dolebirchwood 7mo ago
      My bad.
YVoyiatzis 7mo ago
When the Mac version came out, I was all over it. WordPerfect user at the time, but wird processing was king back then. It would freeze and crash and irritate me. But I loved using it. If anything, it made things interesting for us Mac users as our options to PC software were quite virtually nonexistent.
peter_retief 7mo ago
I have certification in Lotus Notes, I quite liked it. Fairly simple to create an application but not being open source was a problem.
peter_retief 7mo ago
I have been waiting for someone to open source lotus notes, sadly the time is probably past.
nailer 7mo ago
I worked on IBM GS's dedicated Linux team. Notes didn't have a native client, so someone made a secret IBM internal tool call `fetchnotes` - a small binary that converted Lotus X400 email into POP3 or IMAP4 (not sure which), calendar appointments into icals, and contcts into vcard. It got so popular - you could do your work using Thunderbird instead of Notes - that Windows users wanted to run Linux VMs to run Fetchnotes and not have to use Notes.
busywaiting 7mo ago
Lotus/IBM took an extremely flexible, encrypted, document-oriented database with a powerful RAD client platform and tried to sell it as a competitor to Outlook-Exchange. And Outlook-Exchange won, because as terrible as it was (and it was much worse then than it is now) it still had a better user experience than Notes Mail. Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model. Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.
- compiler-guy 7mo ago
  Notes was so, so awful. I miss a lot of cool things from that era, but Notes is not one of them.
tracker1 7mo ago
I have such mixed memories regarding Lotus Notes... prior to working with software dev, I'd worked a few contract stints in data entry/lookup because I could type and 10-key very fast. Later I'd work a few different developer contract roles at the same large banking company. One such contract was to exfiltrate a Notes based application and it's data in to a new application. Apparently integration was the real issue at hand and I can understand why after just dipping my toes into Notes. I can see how easy Notes is to create things, It was nicer than MS Access IMO. But trying to reverse engineer from said apps was painful to say the least. It turns out that the app in question ws so broadly hated, that 3 different groups had already been doing the exact same thing, with 2 others looking into it. They decided to look at the different teams in place and pick one to move forward. It wasn't the team I was on that was kept and so ends my experience with Lotus/IBM Notes. As a pure employee a few years earlier, Notes was pretty nifty, it was used to integrate just about everything in the company. Definitely gives insight into where a lot of Dilbert jokes came from, definitely from Notes. Though allowing JavaScript in HTML email with early Outlook was a really bad design decision as well.

172 points by TMWNN 7mo ago

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.

dharmatech 7mo ago
What platform did you run Domino on? If Domino was solid, I'd imagine Domino on AS/400 was near unstoppable.
- senectus1 7mo ago
  I had an AS/400 but unfortunately never got to run it on that. (it was a JD Edwards server for the ERP system) Nope it was on good old winNT 4 I think we may have upgraded it to windows server 2000 at one point as well. I remember that the disk partition it ran on ran out of disk space once.. it kept ticking along. just didnt let users make changes. Amazing stuff.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- jasondigitized 7mo ago
  It was. I did some I.T. consulting in the Fortune 500 and a few ran Notes on the AS/400.
- projektfu 7mo ago
  As a user, we used two Domino servers. One was Windows NT, the other was Linux. The Linux one was incredibly performant compared to the Windows one. I think it was an example of good reimplementation using hindsight.
- pickle-wizard 7mo ago
  In a past life I was a Domino admin and I ran it on an AS/400. It was great, handled incredible amounts of load, and required little maintenance. The only outage we had was when I accidentally deleted all the databases from the file system. Even that was pretty easy to recover from.

GMoromisato 7mo ago

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.

dundercoder 7mo ago
With everything as a note, how was it so performant? How did it scale so well?
- GMoromisato 7mo ago
  It was basically NoSQL before NoSQL. Each note was just a record, but with no schema. Schemas were imposed at the UI layer by forms and at indexing time by views.
  - boilerupnc 7mo ago
    Related [0] [0]. https://www.wired.com/2012/12/couchdb/ https://www.wired.com/2012/12/couchdb/
- 7mo ago

cake-rusk 7mo ago

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/guardianweeklytechnologysection https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...

cake-rusk 7mo ago
Here's a quote from the article. Hopefully this helps the people with rose tinted glasses get some perspective... >Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?
- projektfu 7mo ago
  It's like the two types of languages: the ones everybody complains about, and the ones nobody uses.
- tracker1 7mo ago
  VB6? I mean, you could do some great things with it, and it was pretty easy to do things with. That said, so many people doing things with it didn't really know what they were doing, had no UX understanding and just created slop. I think half the issues people have with AI today are simply because AI has seen just as much slop in the real world as it has "good, clear code."
jasondigitized 7mo ago
As a email client.
slater 7mo ago
Same. There was a running joke that there's exactly two people who love Lotus Notes: The boss, cos they signed off on it and can never be wrong and it shows commitment to productivity increases and nobody got fired for buying IBM and bla bla bla. The other person was the guy implementing it, cos money, money, money! The boots on the ground cried "ugh, Lotus Notes!" in unison and just had to deal with byzantine key combos, nonstop client crashes/unresponsiveness, and moronic UI decisions some 3-person team made in like 1987. I have opinions.

pscanf 7mo ago

I'm building an app that is, in a way, a modern take on Lotus Notes (https://github.com/superegodev/superego 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 https://www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-software

dharmatech 7mo ago
Just watched your demo here: https://youtu.be/vB3xo2qn_g4?si=y2udkdfezSR9ktUO https://youtu.be/vB3xo2qn_g4?si=y2udkdfezSR9ktUO Pretty cool!
- dharmatech 7mo ago
  I like that you can generate new programs from within the system. That's something I miss with Notion. I basically want a Notion but extensible and malleable like Emacs.
  - pscanf 7mo ago
    Yes! That's more or less the angle I'm going for. I mean, I don't aim just yet for Emacs-levels of malleability, but at least for something where you can create some useful day to day personal tools.
dharmatech 7mo ago
Many people seem to associate "ego" with negative connotation. The name gives a weird vibe. But, it's free and it's your project so, whatever. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

andrewstuart 7mo ago

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.

EvanAnderson 7mo ago
I did contract work for a company who made heavy investments into Notes-based applications. The replication capability was super cool. We would setup a new client computer on the corporate LAN, synchronize them to the various Notes databases they needed, then send the computer out to field service reps who would use the computers mostly offline. They updated over a pool of dial-up modems at headquarters. They would run mostly overnight, with the field service reps dialing-in before bed and leaving it to run until it automatically disconnected. Later they used a VPN and dial-up ISPs. It worked astoundingly well. Their developers moved thru the organization over a period of years making Notes databases out of every paper form-based workflow process they could get their hands on. I lost touch with them and they were acquired by another company, ultimately. I'd love to know what happened to all those custom applications living in Notes. It's hard to think of a platform that could have easily replaced it-- particularly the offline sync / local first portion.
- dharmatech 7mo ago
  Love stories like this about bespoke systems that might still be running out there somewhere.

rahimnathwani 7mo ago

Lotus Domino (the Lotus Notes server) still lives on as HCL Domino: https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/web-servers/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 https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/Public (Note the .nsf extension, which signifies a Notes database)

BoredPositron 7mo ago

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

tracker1 7mo ago
Today's C# isn't bad... assuming you aren't overcomplicating the world through excess abstraction.

zaphod_b 7mo ago

> 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.

canucker2016 7mo ago
They took the Computer Associates (CA) playbook and ran with it. But IBM targeted companies that techies had heard of, while CA seemed to go after only enterprise software that ran in the backoffice.

scottmcdot 7mo ago

I see lots of em dash in this article.

CRConrad 7mo ago
But fortunately, you're not one of those idiots who immediately jump from that to the conclusion that "This article must be written by an AI!" — right...?

tibbydudeza 7mo ago

They turned it into a horrible terrible email client.

est 7mo ago

This looks like the Lisp Curse

mathattack 7mo ago

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.

vsajip 7mo ago

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.

nradov 7mo ago
Later versions of Domino also had full Java support, so you could write applications in that language and just use Domino as a back end database. But you still had to do semi-manual memory management, which made it tough for most Java programmers.
kwanbix 7mo ago
I agree with everything but the UI part. I think it was on par with Office. I used both at the same time. This is if you are compering Outlook, the email client, with the email app in Lotus Notes. As Lotus Notes was much more than email client. I was just the other day talking about Lotus Notes and Outlook. Lotus Notes had 3 different ways to look for info, the most powerfull one being indexing the database. My friend was praising how good Notes search was vs Outlook that never seem to find anything. Lotus Notes Supported Formulas, LotusScript and Java.
- CRConrad 7mo ago
  I've only ever used Notes as a mail client, at a company I did consulting work for decades ago, for most of the 00s. (Yeah, sure, we'd heard that it was more than an email client -- but what did we care, when we didn't use it for anything else?) Based on that, I absolutely disagree with your take on the UI: It was slow, clunky, ugly, and confusing. That was probably a (the) large(st) reason why they switched to MS Outlook. If that was the period UI you meant, you're just wrong. Either you must have meant something newer, or you've suffered, what's it called? I think there is a name for the phenomenon, having your expectations lowered to the level of what you're getting.

acomjean 7mo ago

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.

tracker1 7mo ago
Hard to imagine a place adopting Notes and just using the email... email was always kind of a shortcoming in the box. It was there, but wasn't very good imo. I think that Outlook was pretty great up until they started the cloud editions backing M365... I understand why they've changed it how they have, I just think it was better UX for most people before, even if it didn't scale well.
kwanbix 7mo ago
You are absolutelly right, it was a NoSQL database with a RAID environment on top. It was SO fast to write things in Lotus Notes, that is crazy. I did it for 10 years. It had some limitations, I don't recall them now, but basically you could do almost anything. You had to find a way. But it was FAST to develop. It was crazy.

_nhh 7mo ago

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.

tracker1 7mo ago
I haven't even seen Notes in the wild since around 2008 or so...

maztaim 7mo ago

I had a not great experience with Notes. It was slow and cumbersome. I had become used to Outlook for e-mail, plain simple e-mail. It was fast, light and didn't treat everything as a note. Notes is this heavy app that was slow to load anything with an early 90's aesthetic. I worked for a large financial (~80,000 employees) that decided to move to Notes from in-house exchange servers well after it was obvious Microsoft had won the productivity wars. Rumor mill suggested it was brought in at the direction of a board member who just so happened to have close interests with IBM. It set overall productivity back by at least 5 years before executives were forced to make a very decisive and quick move to O365. The reason given were scalability issues, the overwhelming cost of purchasing P-Series hardware (6-digits for one server) by the rack to keep up with demand along with the cost of developers attempting to make something useful for all of the different business needs. Last I checked they are still stuck with some small, but essential work being diverted through Notes despite the move back to Microsoft.

unfirehose 7mo ago

my favorite part of lotus notes is the password scrambler that prevents people snooping over your shoulder to steal password, I implemented this on my front-end at unsandbox dot com you can test it on teh console page even without an account, the portal itself does not have accounts.

Heer_J 7mo ago

[dead]

baggachipz 7mo ago

My first dev job was a Notes developer. It really was an amazing piece of tech in hindsight. IMO their real folly was chasing the web trend; at its heart it was a groupware product, and they tried to make it be too many things to everybody. I spent most of my time trying to wrestle it into doing things it wasn't meant to do. It got me extremely proficient with LotusScript which led to other opportunities (Hello ASP!) but the whole thing is a shame. Had they stayed in their lane with the product, it might still be alive and widely used today.

tracker1 7mo ago
For that matter, had they invested in a web plugin that treated domino as a thin client server, they may also still be around today. Though load balancing would probably take a bit more work.

DaleBiagio 7mo ago

The PLATO connection is the best part of this piece. PLATO ran its own programming language - TUTOR - which was designed specifically for creating interactive lessons on the system in 1967. It's one of the earliest examples of a domain-specific language shaped entirely by its platform. The system also had real-time chat, message boards, and multiplayer games running on shared terminals in the early 1970s — a decade before BBSs went mainstream. Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.

dolebirchwood 7mo ago
Fuck off, robot.
- DaleBiagio 7mo ago
  Calm down dolebirchwood, not a bot
  - dolebirchwood 7mo ago
    My bad.

YVoyiatzis 7mo ago

When the Mac version came out, I was all over it. WordPerfect user at the time, but wird processing was king back then. It would freeze and crash and irritate me. But I loved using it. If anything, it made things interesting for us Mac users as our options to PC software were quite virtually nonexistent.

peter_retief 7mo ago

I have certification in Lotus Notes, I quite liked it. Fairly simple to create an application but not being open source was a problem.

peter_retief 7mo ago

I have been waiting for someone to open source lotus notes, sadly the time is probably past.

nailer 7mo ago

I worked on IBM GS's dedicated Linux team. Notes didn't have a native client, so someone made a secret IBM internal tool call `fetchnotes` - a small binary that converted Lotus X400 email into POP3 or IMAP4 (not sure which), calendar appointments into icals, and contcts into vcard. It got so popular - you could do your work using Thunderbird instead of Notes - that Windows users wanted to run Linux VMs to run Fetchnotes and not have to use Notes.

busywaiting 7mo ago

Lotus/IBM took an extremely flexible, encrypted, document-oriented database with a powerful RAD client platform and tried to sell it as a competitor to Outlook-Exchange. And Outlook-Exchange won, because as terrible as it was (and it was much worse then than it is now) it still had a better user experience than Notes Mail. Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model. Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.

compiler-guy 7mo ago
Notes was so, so awful. I miss a lot of cool things from that era, but Notes is not one of them.

tracker1 7mo ago

I have such mixed memories regarding Lotus Notes... prior to working with software dev, I'd worked a few contract stints in data entry/lookup because I could type and 10-key very fast. Later I'd work a few different developer contract roles at the same large banking company. One such contract was to exfiltrate a Notes based application and it's data in to a new application. Apparently integration was the real issue at hand and I can understand why after just dipping my toes into Notes. I can see how easy Notes is to create things, It was nicer than MS Access IMO. But trying to reverse engineer from said apps was painful to say the least. It turns out that the app in question ws so broadly hated, that 3 different groups had already been doing the exact same thing, with 2 others looking into it. They decided to look at the different teams in place and pick one to move forward. It wasn't the team I was on that was kept and so ends my experience with Lotus/IBM Notes. As a pure employee a few years earlier, Notes was pretty nifty, it was used to integrate just about everything in the company. Definitely gives insight into where a lot of Dilbert jokes came from, definitely from Notes. Though allowing JavaScript in HTML email with early Outlook was a really bad design decision as well.