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Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

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Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#41

Post by raesene9 »

Whilst Notes had it's frustrations (mainly as a user revolving around its insistence on using its own terminology and layout for everything), I thought it had strong points that made it an excellent tool for knowledge management.

Notes databases were easily replicated for offline use and encrpyted for data security (when I was using it was back in the mid 2000's before Full disk encryption became common).

In the days of poor Internet connectivity this made it immensely valuable for travelling consultants who could easily take large quantities of information on the move with them and synch it when in the office.

These days for end users I guess OneNote comes closest to that, but even there I don't think it has all the features that Notes did...

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#42

Post by open-source-ux »

slantyyz wrote: post #35
topspin wrote: post #13

A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. I worked for a 300-ish employee company spread over 4 countries and 2 US states around 2001-2004 and we used Notes for all internal document management, email and later even web content management. The thing just quietly kept everything in sync; distributed servers, mobile users and their laptops and traditional desktops, and never lost a byte of it despite fl…

I used to work for a company that built Notes apps in the mid 90s, and while the UI was clunky as hell, it was a great tool. I was a big fan of the Domino back end too, in spite of the ridicule it got. When Couch and Mongo came out, it was kinda refreshing to me to see "document" oriented dbs come back.

"...the UI was clunky as hell..."

The Interface Hall of Shame website (a now defunct, but once popular website with examples of badly designed UIs) did a critique of Lotus Notes back in 1999:

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=or...

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#43

Post by mgkimsal »

Wish I'd seen this doc before I started using Notes - would have given me a much clearer perspective (although... I might have 'grokked' as much at such a young age).

Notes left a bad taste in my mouth in 96-97, as I was working at a company doing custom Notes app (not originally, but we morphed in to Notes after I started). I was tasked with doing Notes app customization and creation on and for laptops with Win95 and a whopping 8m of RAM. Doing anything in Notes was painful. We had one project where we got... 32m I think, and that was certainly bearable, but I was canned shortly after that...

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#45

Post by Someone »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #8

Somewhat related: I came across the visicalc documentation from 1981: http://toastytech.com/manuals/VisiCalc%201.1.pdf Page 123 of the pdf (page 3-3/3-4 ) is a massive state machine showing all of the commands and modes.

And for those wanting to play along, there's a legal download of the executable from Dan Bricklin's site: http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm (also has the reference cards)

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#46

Post by noahmend »

As many people here are saying, Notes was at its core a remarkable achievement for its time. One thing that kept it from more widespread adoption as an application platform, I believe, was the lack of any synchronization or atomicity model. The open "multimaster" replication model was ahead of its time in allowing offline updates, but every application had to reinvent any needed reconciliation logic more or less from scratch, and with few helpful tools.

If Notes could have done more to solve that problem, I think people would have flocked to it as a distributed application platform.

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#47

Post by Havoc »

topspin wrote: post #13

A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. I worked for a 300-ish employee company spread over 4 countries and 2 US states around 2001-2004 and we used Notes for all internal document management, email and later even web content management. The thing just quietly kept everything in sync; distributed servers, mobile users and their laptops and traditional desktops, and never lost a byte of it despite fl…

>A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. [...] 2004

Well then its become progressively worse since. Been using it for 3 years now and each version has gotten progressively worse (unstable, slow, bloated).

Random people's Notes crashes multiple times a day, others have mysteriously slow ones, sync issues etc.

Its only redeeming feature is SameTime...

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#48

Post by codeulike »

slantyyz wrote: post #35
topspin wrote: post #13

A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. I worked for a 300-ish employee company spread over 4 countries and 2 US states around 2001-2004 and we used Notes for all internal document management, email and later even web content management. The thing just quietly kept everything in sync; distributed servers, mobile users and their laptops and traditional desktops, and never lost a byte of it despite fl…

I used to work for a company that built Notes apps in the mid 90s, and while the UI was clunky as hell, it was a great tool. I was a big fan of the Domino back end too, in spite of the ridicule it got. When Couch and Mongo came out, it was kinda refreshing to me to see "document" oriented dbs come back.

Aha! I worked with Notes a few decades ago, interfacing it into PeopleSoft. I got it to work but I never really got a grip on the slippery concept of what exactly Lotus Notes was, and why it was so terrible at one-to-many data structures. But thanks to your comment I now get it! It was a document oriented nosql db, years before we had a name for that.

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#49

Post by andrewstuart »

It's hard to convey how forward thinking Notes was back in the day - a replicated, document oriented database with encryption and visual user oriented programming.

Some loved it, some hated it but it was certainly unique.

I'm happy not to be using it any more but I thank Lotus Notes for paying my rent and food bills for a long time.

Re: Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

#50

Post by slantyyz »

codeulike wrote: post #48
slantyyz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for a company that built Notes apps in the mid 90s, and while the UI was clunky as hell, it was a great tool. I was a big fan of the Domino back end too, in spite of the ridicule it got. When Couch and Mongo came out, it was kinda refreshing to me to see "document" oriented dbs come back.

Aha! I worked with Notes a few decades ago, interfacing it into PeopleSoft. I got it to work but I never really got a grip on the slippery concept of what exactly Lotus Notes was, and why it was so terrible at one-to-many data structures. But thanks to your comment I now get it! It was a document oriented nosql db, years before we had a name for that.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe IBM at some point ended up moving the Domino back end to something relational like DB2 long after I stopped using Notes.

I was a MacOS (8 or 9) user when I got that job working with Notes. The thing that I found that helped me learn Notes very quickly was my background using Filemaker Pro. This was before Filemaker Pro had "gone relational".

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