Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

Most of what's listed there is about bad application development (error checking and so forth). Many other complaints come from the fact that Notes was multi-platform (Win, Mac, OS/2, many Unices) and was consistent across all clients, rather than trying to look native in any one of them. The thing about that site that gives me the greatest kicks is that the pages of application tiles on the workspace has since become the way to do things, the only real changes being colour depth, screen resolution and vogue colour choices. (About F5/F9: F5 didn't mean "refresh" to anybody until MSIE came along; F9 did.)

Absolutely agree. I spent a lot of time in Notes, read all the blogs, and had all the certifications. It definetly shaped how I look at things even 15 years later. The combination of the ACL, reader / author fields, views, agents, and forms was beautiful

I used and developed in Lotus Notes for 13 years. All those years I heard how Notes was awful, and how wonderful Exchange and Outlook where... so when I changed company to a Microsoft centric one, in 2014, I was (eager and) prepared to be blown away by the Exchange + SharePoint + Outlook 2013 combination. Oh boy, was I wrong. Lotus Notes runs circles around the E+S+O combination. There is no way that they can touch the power and flexibility of Notes. I was even SHOCKED to see how HORRIBLE the Outlook interface is. How poor it is for a product that does two things: email and calendar. Also, I was shocked how horrible Skype for business is compared to Sametime... And I still don't get how Control-F is not FIND in Outlook...

I have done a Windows Server, to Linux to AIX... it was only a matter of moving the "DATA" folder... and it worked perfectly each time...

My first experience with Notes was in grad school in 1992. It looked ugly and didn't make much sense to my relationally-educated brain.

I bumped into it again in the mid-90s when Notes 3 was released and the lightbulb went off. I became a Notes developer overnight.

Things Notes solved years before its time include:

1. distributed databases everywhere even over a crappy pipe

2. distributed software releases through replication (this was genius - everyone forgets in the 90s most end-user software was still distributed on floppies, but with Notes you just push the design out in a replica and all of your end-users get their client apps magically updated)

3. A fully integrated visual app dev + server admin platform that made design of apps a snap. It became possible to sit down with a team and instead of writing down requirements, actually building a working model of the app in the meeting as they describe their needs. This was 1994, and it's still hard to do in most development environments compared to the ease of Notes.

4. Public-Private key identity management and a terrific security model all the way down. It made it very easy to enforce a very granular security policy across all the apps down to individual rows of data with the same global security mechanism. As a dev it made it trivial to build a highly secure app without having to think much at all about security.

5. OS independence!

I worked in one shop in a ~$1B/rev company in 1997 - this team had 3 admins and 4 devs handling email and all the internal corporate apps, pretty much all built in Notes except the financial system which was its own team. This company had fully embraced Notes as an internal app dev platform and had built a marvelously powerful set of workflow apps for all of their core business processes - some 30+ apps total - all of which integrated with each other.

Watching a team of 7 people manage and develop this awesome backoffice system was a big eye opener for me. This company leveraged their IT staff 10:1 or better compared to similar companies using typical tools. A well-run Notes shop in the Glory Years of Notes (1995-2005) was truly a sight to behold.

My longest-lived solutions are Notes apps I built ~16 years ago still being used today.

Fun fact: CouchDB was built by Damien Katz based on a lot of his experience working on Notes / Domino while at Lotus, and Damien Katz is a badass it turns out.