Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS

Secondly, as someone who spent 15 years working with Lotus Notes, I can assure you that you can run it standalone. Obviously it makes no real sense for a Groupware product, but it can be done. To the Notes client opening a database locally or on a mail server is largely the same.

The main issue is that people used Notes to communicate and collaborate. So you could just go creating new Address Books, Discussion databases, Document Libraries and so on, but what exactly are you proving with that? It's be like just firing up the Microsoft Mail client and only looking at the address book...

Whilst I'm aware that there's plenty in Notes that people didn't like, I do think that there are some gems hidden in there which it would have been nice to have kept. The Notes dialect of Rich Text had a couple of niceties (programmable buttons, collapsible/expandable Sections). The database engine itself was unparalleled at the time, and in some ways it still hasn't been bettered.

But the issue remains that you'd need to set up a Notes/Domino Server (depending on your version - 4.5 onwards it's called Domino), and a small network. And that's a ball-ache that nobody wants. It can speak IPX/SPX and NetBIOS, so it doesn't have to be as complicated as TCP/IP, but it's still a lot of prep work before you even get to start looking at the usage. :-(

That having been said, I was a Principal Certified Lotus Professional on the Sysadmin track for about three versions of Notes, from 4.6 to 6, and can definitely help if you ever did want to do that. Feel free to email me at phil [at] philipstorry.net if you're ever so lacking in subjects that you feel forced into this last resort.

DOS 6 added menus in config.sys IIRC that removed the need for this.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

and as stated there

    The only thing that made it look reasonable was 
    that it looked great compared to Lotus macros, 
    which were nothing more than a sequence of 
    keystrokes entered as a long string into a 
    worksheet cell.

One of my jobs was making bootleg copies so everybody could have a copy, until the NY office was busted and they paid out enough to incentivize them to buy copies as needed.

I consider this period of time to be a watershed moment for humanity: prior to this, a lot of business was run on notions and assumptions. With powerful spreadsheets and macros businesses could play "what if" and turn the whole affair into a profit/loss scenario (including labor, e.g., people) and think of businesses simply as a pile of numbers where they only care about maximizing the bottom line.