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LotusNotes

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Re: LotusNotes

#101

Post by pscanf »

WillAdams wrote: post #97
pscanf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your methodology would seem to be a reasonable approach/response to get the benefits of this and to shield against the detriments If you're referring to the sandboxing / isolation of each app, I agree. Plus, the user can change the app quite easily, so if when they spot a bug, they can tell the agent to fix it (and cross their fingers!). > ensure that a human developer understands the code before committing Just to…

I was referring more to your commentary/explanation about it not being a Vibe-coded app. Yeah, I can see that one is on their own recognizance when letting an LLM run unsupervised.

Ah yeah, I understand now. And I also agree with the quote then! (Though it does change the nature of the job, and it's not terribly enjoyable...)

Re: LotusNotes

#102

Post by kwanbix »

acomjean wrote: post #50

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 custo…

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.

Re: LotusNotes

#103

Post by p2detar »

andrewstuart wrote: post #62
jasondigitized wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cut my teeth in Lotus Notes development. The combination of forms, views, and agents with the Notes security model was really powerful. I look at products like Notion and Coda and see nothing but Notes forms and views and formulas everywhere. Ray Ozzie was way ahead of his time.

AirTable is a straight up Notes clone.

I don't see it. Airtable is cloud-native and Lotus Notes is all about offline mode and replicas. Not even sure how Email fairs in Airtable, because it's a major point in Notes.

Re: LotusNotes

#104

Post by p2detar »

GMoromisato wrote: post #3

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…

> Lotus Notes died

Ahm, it didn't. I mean, yes it is actively dying but not quite there yet. In fact, where I work we still make good revenue offering consulting and even products for LND. I think this part at the end of the article sums it up well:

> Lotus Notes is now HCL Notes, and as far as I can tell HCL intends to just enjoy the revenue as long as legacy customers will pay them to keep Notes running.

Yes, there are, and I dare say, a lot of legacy customers still paying for LND. So it is dying, but not as fast as people tend to think.

edit: typos

Re: LotusNotes

#105

Post by WillAdams »

pscanf wrote: post #101
WillAdams wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring more to your commentary/explanation about it not being a Vibe-coded app. Yeah, I can see that one is on their own recognizance when letting an LLM run unsupervised.

Ah yeah, I understand now. And I also agree with the quote then! (Though it does change the nature of the job, and it's not terribly enjoyable...)

Hopefully you can find some way to keep the enjoyment in this.

Re: LotusNotes

#106

Post by CRConrad »

kwanbix wrote: post #99
vsajip wrote: post #45

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 a…

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 frien…

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.

Re: LotusNotes

#107

Post by CRConrad »

andrewstuart wrote: post #8

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 secur…

> At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.

The future, and mainly from the past: In the literal sense, it was derived from a mainframe application -- but above all, it carried with it that anti-personal centralised philosophy.

But yeah, from the future too: That's where we are (and have been for a good while now) headed back to, with all this "cloud"[1] stuff. The erstwhile PC is well on its way to becoming just a terminal again.

___

[1]: There is no "cloud"; it's just other people's computers.

Re: LotusNotes

#108

Post by CRConrad »

scottmcdot wrote: post #38

I see lots of em dash in this article.

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...?

Re: LotusNotes

#109

Post by kwanbix »

CRConrad wrote: post #106
kwanbix wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 frien…

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 Ou…

I think it's important to start by saying that using Lotus Notes only as an email client misses the bigger picture, as Lotus Notes was was so much much much more than that. IBM had thouthands of custom made apps running on Lotus Notes. I had built about 50 apps.

Also, you didn't mention when you used it. I worked with Lotus Notes from 1995 to 2010, and the experience really depended on the hardware available at the time. Once it was up and running, it performed just fine if you had enough memory. For example, I still have version 8.0.2 (from 2008) on my machine, and it uses roughly 13MB at idle and up to about 50MB depending on installed apps, which isn't much by modern standards. But back in 1995, when 8MB of RAM was common, if Notes took up 6MB, I can see how that would have been a real issue. In my case, my ThinkPad had 32MB, then 64MB, and even 192MB which is the moment I installed Windows 2000.

As for the UI, the email client was highly configurable. Honestly, I don't remember ever thinking that something like Netscape Mail or The Bat looked or any email client that I tried at the time looked better. I didn't use Outlook back then, so I can't compare directly, but if Outlook over the past decade is any indication, Lotus Notes was at least on par, if not better that it.

What's really surprising is that even today, Lotus Notes had features that many modern clients still lack. For example, you could select multiple emails and forward them all together in a single message. Simple, but incredibly useful, and not something you commonly see implemented even now.

For reference, here's what the email client looked like: https://ds-infolib.hcltechsw.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/xpDocVie...

I still don't see how Outlook is better than that.

Re: LotusNotes

#110

Post by dolebirchwood »

DaleBiagio wrote: post #76

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 b…

Fuck off, robot.
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