My first exposure to Lotus Notes was to work on a migration project that was moving from Notes to "Exchange WebStorage System" (WebDAV) - which was an aborted "go-nowhere" server/service which ended-up being replaced by SharePoint ("Teams Services") - which we had to also re-target mid-project.
We faced a situation where we had about 4,000 custom Notes apps to migrate, a small team and an extremely limited time. (and varying levels of complexity in each app)
What we found we could do, was "expose" the apps as "Notes Web" apps, and extract much of the UI/UX, and other artifacts - then we wrote conversion utilities.
We were able to get the migration time for simple apps down to the time it took us to demonstrate our framework... (20 minutes per app).
However - quite honestly, the more I saw of Notes at the time, the more I asked "Why migrate?". As the feature-set of early "SharePoint" was not even "at par" with Notes - even now, with the myriad of M365/desktop/app integrations, it is generally "just ok" and does not feel "cohesive".
Agree with that, I've used both Notes heavily in the past and SharePoint/Exchange as a software engineer exposed to them and Notes always felt more cohesive. Notes (and Oracle products) get dumped on in discussions on Reddit and sometimes on HN but Notes worked well and was very consistent, Oracle products too for that matter, in my experience.
Notes and Sametime also worked very well on Linux on my IBM work laptop, supported by support, official Linux distro inside IBM. That was mid-late 2000's when many companies hadn't even thought of trying to support both Windows and Linux (or Mac).
> “If I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it,” went one of the many complaints collected on Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood’s blog. “How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT+1, naturally.”
I don't know if I want to fault Lotus for that. As someone who juggles between Windows, Mac and Linux on a daily basis, using wrong keyboard shortcuts is something that happens regularly. For most users who only use a single platform, that's even less of a problem -- you only need to learn it once.
This is how I feel about the article in general -- I am not convinced by its arguments. Many of the design decisions make sense to me even today, and are more of a necessary limitation than anything else. I don't see how "at most 8 windows" is any worse than Windows' 256 character limit -- 8 windows are plenty at the time, and you need to decide to stop optimizing for someone who regularly has 20 open windows for no reason and focus on something else. Handling more windows can come later.
The larger point - which they made poorly - seems to be that Notes made a lot of decisions that probably were fine alone. However nothing stands alone, and everybody else made a different decision.
Some of the different decisions everybody made were for good reason. I know Apple and [later] Microsoft spent a large amount of money on human factors engineers doing real experiments to figure out what worked. I have never seen evidence that Lotus spent the money to see what was a good idea - they just made it work.
My first internship and job out of college was as a Notes developer. I spent most of my time trying to trick/strongarm Notes into doing what I wanted. Want to build a timekeeping system? Sure, I can do that. A website? No problem, Domino server made it easy(ish).
The paradigm of everything being a database with documents was ahead of its time, but the real power was in LotusScript. It was basically just Javascript and that allowed me to transition to a web dev role later on. I have mostly fond memories of Notes.
I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, and that’s a tough spot to build in (and which partly accounts for both the fond and bad memories that both typically surface whenever Lotus Notes is mentioned).
This. Any engineer or manager developing Notes at the time had to be aware of X.400 and X.500, and SMTP. They decided to ignore them. However cool and useful and clumsy Notes was, it was a proprietary walled garden. Lotus and the IBM hawked it, and surely profited. But for the customer it was an expense. Eventually Notes was overtaken by Metcalf’s Law, and the fact that cheaper always wins.
Sure, but Notes was built for a world where ccMail, MS Mail, and GroupWise were the main workgroup email systems.
Notes followed a similar pattern, with a proprietary "post office" system with optional gateways to larger x.400 / SMTP / UUCP / OfficeVision networks for those who needed them.
Going SMTP (or even x.400)-native from the start might have been a better choice in the long run, but that's only clear in retrospect - it certainly wasn't obvious at the time.
Yeah, Exchange is a good comparator because it shows what the mail aspect of Notes might have been like had it been designed in the mid 90s rather than the late 80s.
It's hard now to appreciate how different corporate IT was from the free-wheeling Internet world. The unexpected popularity of the web really did change everything.
in 1990 the internet was something talked about on your BBS as a mystical place you couldn't get access to except as a student. Lots of places had email, but it was unusual for anyone to be connected to any other system. Sometimes a BBS was part of fidonet, but that was rare (and there were many many less known networks).
Even if your typical big company did have a gateway for their internal email to other companies, odds are very few people used that gateway for business. If you wanted to communicate with somebody in a different company you dialed the phone or sent a fax.
On the other hand, anyone working on Notes would also be aware that its relationship with email is closer to today's Sharepoint than to today's Exchange. Email was one small aspect of a massive featureset; Notes was ahead of its time in terms of CRM/ERP/one-platform-for-everything that drives modern businesses like Oracle and Salesforce.
Usually, when someone talks about "starting from scratch" they mean "starting over from scratch," meaning throwing out something good enough in the hope of building something perfect.
This article is more about "first mover disadvantage" or "handicap of a head start" where an early implementation is leapfrogged by competitors that don't have legacy baggage.
I think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…
I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
>Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something?
In a way yes, IBM wanted notes to be an email clone. IBM took cc mail (I think) and shoehorned it into Lotus notes.
To me, that ruined Notes. If I get the versions numbers right, version 3 was great, IBM/Lotus came out with v4, which to me was a bit worse, and each new version was worse than the prior. Instead of focusing on emails, IBM should have focused on making notes servers easy to install and maintain and keep the application portion relevant.
By worse, it was the application portion that degraded. If you saw how cool the applications were with v3, you would wonder why Notes never became a "thing". Even third parties were creating applications for Notes at the time, some were very good. But to me IBM ruined that business by focusing on only Email part of Notes. Now AFAIK, there are no 3rd party applications for notes.
Maybe the company that bought notes from IBM is trying to get back to the roots, but I kind of doubt it.
As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it.
Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one custom app or a hundred.
I am in the middle of it. We might do it till the end of 2026 with only two developers and about 50+ databases. Once we just _ported_ the databases instead of rethinking them, we increased speed by a order of magnitude. We can rethink later on the new platform
It's 2026 and I am still in the middle of porting our notes databases to web. Notes is still the main platform for our applications, we have around 50 or so. I have a lot of respect for what notes is and what it enabled developers to do and I try to bring some ideas of it to the platform I am building. Funny enough today is exactly the day I did the initial commit on the new project one year ago. Happy birthday to my platform i guess.
I was a Lotus Notes developer for more than 10 years. The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. I started with Notes 4.5, IIRC, and ended my time around Notes 8.
The first few years were a little heavy on RAM usage, so people thought it was slow. To give you some context, this was back when 16 MB (megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM was a thing. But as RAM increased, Notes was no longer a problem.
For example, Lotus Notes 8, which I still have on my personal PC, uses about 11 MB just after starting. Then it adds roughly 10 MB for each "app" you open. Today, Outlook alone uses around 170 MB just after starting.
It was incredibly powerful. And migrating a Domino server was incredibly easy. Basically, you just copied the DATA folder. I remember doing this when we migrated from Windows 2000/2003 to AIX.
In the same way, the Notes client was basically a portable app. You could just copy the NOTES and DATA folder, edit notes.ini, and have it running.
> The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing.
It is. And it's the main thing why my boss does not understand why rebuilding databases takes so much time. For him its just a little thing, some fields and off you go...
Unfortunately it is possible for databases to be copied, mixed and matched and deployed somewhere else resulting i a pile of duplicated databases without structure.
That's crazy. I did a Notes migration to a custom Java/Red Hat platform 20 years ago, even at that time it was like "can't believe these guys are on Lotus Notes". I remember Howard Stern used to reference LN on his radio show in the early 90s.
I worked for Ray Ozzie at Groove, and I still mourn what that could have become. It was, in many ways, a modern reimagining of Notes, but that meant it had the same problem: customers and users thought they were using a product, but they had actually bought a PLATFORM. It was a digital choose your own adventure, but people really wanted a better chat room.
I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases.
It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.
I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time.
I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
> I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" which isn't feature complete is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
My only interaction with outlook in the last 15+ years has been via web view, as I run linux. It does the job -- indeed I find it better than modern gmail.
> that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial
Lotus Notes allows you to right-click on a "document" and see absolutely all data attached to it, directly in the UI, including access permissions. This can be immensely useful, because not all data could be part of its UI representation.
The closest to this today would be inspecting the JSON data on your browser networking tab to view what your app exchanges with the server, but its much more clunky.
We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.
I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow.
Yeah, Notes had its shared database features, and you could see remnants of IBMers using them at the time, but most such applications been ported to Java CRUD apps. Also Lotus Sametime (it's like Slack) became a much more important collaboration tool.
I don't have many memories of my father but one thing I very vaguely remember is the quirky way it would scramble each character when he entered his password in Lotus Notes.
The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985).
I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.
The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of technology, as much as it is a quiet kind of informational arms race.
I liked Notes after working at IBM. Until, well, I didn't. That happened at my next job, after I failed to survive a round of IBM layoffs.
Used well, Notes had tremendous power. Enough to make the deficiencies of late-'90s/early-2000s email tolerable.
Used badly, Notes could easily fuel the kind of rant that ended with you being angry the office windows didn't open, because the only sound that might calm your inner rage was your computer's second bounce off the pavement.
But that could describe a lot of IBM software at the time. Often good ideas, but rarely enough structure to protect people from inflicting their own silliness on themselves.
There is a great story about movies and VHS/Betamax.
The movie studios were pretty sure that people would want to buy movies and watch them at home. What they weren't sure about was how to price the movies because this was a brand new market that had never existed before.
This led to the price for a movie on VHS/Beta ranging from $10 to over $100 because no one knew what the actual demand curve looked like.
I feel like the 1990s was a lot like this but with UI/UX. People had opinions on what consumers wanted but the market was expanding so quickly that no one knew for sure. Firms just tried things and, in hindsight, some firms seemed "smarter" because they picked the feature set that customers ended up liking.
Interesting to read it originated as part of PLATO. I used notes at a company in the early oughts. This company was a big user of ibm mainframes. It was bizarre and although it was purported to have all this capability I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with it; like access lotus script. As an inveterate tinkerer, it frustrated me, I assumed I didn’t have permissions or something.
I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.
I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version.
Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.
Just to add that nowadays once can use HCL Verse for web- or mobile app-based email access to their Lotus Notes email database. It's quite sleek and it works.
So... PLATO user, Notes user and Thunderbird user here with a
couple of notes.
a. Everything you think is new was created in the 1960s by Don
Bitzer @ UIUC or Doug Engelbart @ SRI. (and probably also
Robert Creasy @ IBM.)
b. Lotus Notes (and Groove) were products, not protocols. If
you wanted to use them, you used Windows and the server and
client from the vendor.
c. Lotus Notes only sort of worked over the intarwebs. It had
serious problems traversing firewalls, and technically worked
over VPNs, but was nearly unusable as it required you to
either replicate your AD server or use AD over the VPN (I do
not recommend the latter option.)
d. Like JIRA, in order to do anything interesting with Lotus
Notes, you effectively had to have admin privileges. This
isn't strictly true, but it's effectively true. Both JIRA
and Lotus Notes were designed for organizations whose thinky
bits were managed centrally. Have a site or department
specific process? Better schedule time with your admin to
talk about how they're going to model your work-flow because
there's no way you're going to be able to build it yourself.
Groove was a little better, but it was disturbingly easy for
the brittle XML based DTDs used to model data to become out
of sync between users. Guess it's time to restore from
backup.
e. As much as I loved PLATO, it was a centralized / mainframe
type system. Of course it was easy to coordinate via a notes
file, it was a single file on a centrally shared,
non-replicated volume that (usually) had very loose write
permissions.
The reason notes (or it's bastard offspring Lotus Notes)
didn't take over the world was it put all the thinky bits in
one place, probably locked down by a BOFH. There's little we
learned from the micro-computer revolution from the 70s and
80s, but what we did seem to get is we all hated being
dependent on that one guy from accounting to write a few
COBOL programs for us so we could see what our sales figures
looked like this month.
It seems weird we're comparing PLATO NOTES with Lotus Notes
email. PNOTES (Personal Notes) was the equivalent of email.
NOTES was more the equivalent of Usenet News.
And Notes was an application environment w/ data replication
that had a shim layer on top of it that looked like an email
system. It was more like Hypercard with git-ish semantics.
(Which now that I think about it, wouldn't be that bad of a
product.)
But... after more than 50 years in tech, I still use Thunderbird
as my email client. If I could figure out a way to get it to
turn off HTML mail I would. I'm on the vanguard of the orange
catholic butlerian jihad. Not only do I seek a prohibition of
thinking machines, I'm also quite suspcious of richly formatted
text.
Maybe the reason (Lotus) Notes failed was that people kept
thinking of it as an email client. Raymond Lowey talked about
the "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" principle. Meaning you can
push product design only so far before people no longer
understand how they're expected to integrate it into their
lives. Lotus Notes was the poster child for this concept.
> But... after more than 50 years in tech, I still use Thunderbird as my email client. If I could figure out a way to get it to turn off HTML mail I would.
There was a joke going round when Lotus Notes was still mildly popular:
There's exactly two people who LOVE Lotus Notes. One is the boss, cos he's never wrong, and the other is the Lotus Notes developer/integrator, cos he's getting money.
EVERYONE else in the org goes "Uggghghghhh, not Lotus Notes!"
I joined a company using Notes back in '00. Performed the 4 to 5 upgrade, skipped 6 and went to 7.
We had our "email blast" code in the founder of the companies mail database. When we launched new features or had various announcements, you would log on to Mark's email database and run those features in the drop down. Of course there were various permissions in check that only certain people could do (or view) certain things in the database, but that's where it ended up...
I always thought the data/design replication was cool as well. I had to bake in what I called "relational fields" into the documents to be able to perform some standard relational database type of work, but it was really easy to work with overall. Maybe too easy - as one person mentioned in the thread, there were hundreds of little custom apps built by anyone/everyone in the company, because it was just that easy.
In the 90’s I worked for a large retailer. Our centralized systems were on IBM mainframes, with some Unix servers for specialized work. We ran a small Unix server - really just a decent PC - in the stores. We had very low end machines running DOS-based terminal emulators for POS, etc.
Senior management wanted a some kind of communication platform for store employees. Something that could handle shared, broadcast comms to all employees, but also individualized comms to store managers, and ideally even questionnaire-like forms for surveys and the like. The entire system had to be secure and tightly controlled, e.g. employee A at store 1 shouldn’t be able to email employee B at store 2.
At some point we’d adopted using Lotus Notes at the HQ as platform de jour. (previously we were all in on PowerBuilder apps, remember that?).
It was no surprise, then, when IBM flew a one of our VPs to Cambridge (or maybe Boca Raton as part of another deal…) and he came back and announced we had purchased something like 50,000 seats for Lotus Notes and were implementing it as a store comm system.
A colleague and I were part of the architectural team. We didn’t have much of a formalized practice in those days, but we’d both been involved in the design and implementation of a lot of key store systems, and we weren’t idiots. We pointed out we’d never tested this sort of thing.
The Lotus team suggested installing Notes in a test store. We pointed out we had no compatible Windows equipment in the store. They suggested accessing Notes remotely. I can’t recall how. Unfortunately, our store networking system was Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite-based. High bandwidth, but also high latency, something like 3-4 seconds. Interactive apps over VSAT just didn’t cut it.
Now my memory of all details is a little fuzzy after 30 years, but as I recollect, Notes could effectively work offline, and then synchronize when back online. This was a cool feature for distributing apps and data. So, of course, the Lotus teams said the obvious, “Just purchase a separate server for Notes in the stores, and we can sync to that, and then all access will be local.”
Did I mention this was Retail?
Suffice it to say when we told Sr Mgmt the solution was going to require purchasing a dedicated server for every location (we were growing like crazy those days), the whole thing came to a screeching halt, and the 50K seat deal was cancelled. Someone lost a nice commission.
At the time I didn’t blame IBM. They were just acting on very incomplete information. Our VP, and old MF guy who now had responsibility for “Distributed Systems” as well, should have had an internal review before committing. I suspect he didn’t get any IBM Christmas cards that year.
Did we adopt standard email for comms? Oh, heck no. We rolled our own Frankenstein implementation of a backend and client, replete with our first C app on MVS. That’s a story for another day.
Notes stayed alive as our internal email, etc client for quite a while longer. I even got it running under Red Hat Linux, courtesy of Wine. Eventually the wheel turned, and we moved to something else. Was it better? No.
An absolute classic of "we've done no requirements analysis at all, but our exec went drinking with the wrong people and that now defines the solution, regardless of the problem".
Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.
In all honesty, I don't think this "concern" is valid anymore. With AI, I firmly believe that if it needs to be done, you should do it. Look at Bun. It took 11 days for them to rewrite it into Rust from Zig and it was all done through AI.
My first exposure to Lotus Notes was to work on a migration project that was moving from Notes to "Exchange WebStorage System" (WebDAV) - which was an aborted "go-nowhere" server/service which ended-up being replaced by SharePoint ("Teams Services") - which we had to also re-target mid-project.
We faced a situation where we had about 4,000 custom Notes apps to migrate, a small team and an extremely limited time. (and varying levels of complexity in each app)
What we found we could do, was "expose" the apps as "Notes Web" apps, and extract much of the UI/UX, and other artifacts - then we wrote conversion utilities.
We were able to get the migration time for simple apps down to the time it took us to demonstrate our framework... (20 minutes per app).
However - quite honestly, the more I saw of Notes at the time, the more I asked "Why migrate?". As the feature-set of early "SharePoint" was not even "at par" with Notes - even now, with the myriad of M365/desktop/app integrations, it is generally "just ok" and does not feel "cohesive".
Agree with that, I've used both Notes heavily in the past and SharePoint/Exchange as a software engineer exposed to them and Notes always felt more cohesive. Notes (and Oracle products) get dumped on in discussions on Reddit and sometimes on HN but Notes worked well and was very consistent, Oracle products too for that matter, in my experience.
Notes and Sametime also worked very well on Linux on my IBM work laptop, supported by support, official Linux distro inside IBM. That was mid-late 2000's when many companies hadn't even thought of trying to support both Windows and Linux (or Mac).
Notes was legit. It was very featureful and cool but the amount of support and hardware required was quite high. A little ahead of its time.
100% my sentiment.
> “If I want to ‘refresh’ the inbox shouldn’t I press F5? Nope, that will lock the app and require your password to unlock it,” went one of the many complaints collected on Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood’s blog. “How do I send an email? CTRL+ENTER? Of course not! ALT+1, naturally.”
I don't know if I want to fault Lotus for that. As someone who juggles between Windows, Mac and Linux on a daily basis, using wrong keyboard shortcuts is something that happens regularly. For most users who only use a single platform, that's even less of a problem -- you only need to learn it once.
This is how I feel about the article in general -- I am not convinced by its arguments. Many of the design decisions make sense to me even today, and are more of a necessary limitation than anything else. I don't see how "at most 8 windows" is any worse than Windows' 256 character limit -- 8 windows are plenty at the time, and you need to decide to stop optimizing for someone who regularly has 20 open windows for no reason and focus on something else. Handling more windows can come later.
This article just reads weird to me.
The larger point - which they made poorly - seems to be that Notes made a lot of decisions that probably were fine alone. However nothing stands alone, and everybody else made a different decision.
Some of the different decisions everybody made were for good reason. I know Apple and [later] Microsoft spent a large amount of money on human factors engineers doing real experiments to figure out what worked. I have never seen evidence that Lotus spent the money to see what was a good idea - they just made it work.
My first internship and job out of college was as a Notes developer. I spent most of my time trying to trick/strongarm Notes into doing what I wanted. Want to build a timekeeping system? Sure, I can do that. A website? No problem, Domino server made it easy(ish).
The paradigm of everything being a database with documents was ahead of its time, but the real power was in LotusScript. It was basically just Javascript and that allowed me to transition to a web dev role later on. I have mostly fond memories of Notes.
I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?
Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, and that’s a tough spot to build in (and which partly accounts for both the fond and bad memories that both typically surface whenever Lotus Notes is mentioned).
SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.
More like 3 years, and in a very niche network that was not generally deployed in companies looking for email outside of certain niches.
Absolutely, but it came several years before MIME for example for formatted emails with attachments, and other things.
SMTP is not a user interface. It’s just text from RFC821/822
This. Any engineer or manager developing Notes at the time had to be aware of X.400 and X.500, and SMTP. They decided to ignore them. However cool and useful and clumsy Notes was, it was a proprietary walled garden. Lotus and the IBM hawked it, and surely profited. But for the customer it was an expense. Eventually Notes was overtaken by Metcalf’s Law, and the fact that cheaper always wins.
That and, you know, Microsoft.
Sure, but Notes was built for a world where ccMail, MS Mail, and GroupWise were the main workgroup email systems.
Notes followed a similar pattern, with a proprietary "post office" system with optional gateways to larger x.400 / SMTP / UUCP / OfficeVision networks for those who needed them.
Going SMTP (or even x.400)-native from the start might have been a better choice in the long run, but that's only clear in retrospect - it certainly wasn't obvious at the time.
Exchange is funny because it's X.400 native internally, even if recently they dropped external X.400 support
Yeah, Exchange is a good comparator because it shows what the mail aspect of Notes might have been like had it been designed in the mid 90s rather than the late 80s.
It's hard now to appreciate how different corporate IT was from the free-wheeling Internet world. The unexpected popularity of the web really did change everything.
in 1990 the internet was something talked about on your BBS as a mystical place you couldn't get access to except as a student. Lots of places had email, but it was unusual for anyone to be connected to any other system. Sometimes a BBS was part of fidonet, but that was rare (and there were many many less known networks).
Even if your typical big company did have a gateway for their internal email to other companies, odds are very few people used that gateway for business. If you wanted to communicate with somebody in a different company you dialed the phone or sent a fax.
On the other hand, anyone working on Notes would also be aware that its relationship with email is closer to today's Sharepoint than to today's Exchange. Email was one small aspect of a massive featureset; Notes was ahead of its time in terms of CRM/ERP/one-platform-for-everything that drives modern businesses like Oracle and Salesforce.
Usually, when someone talks about "starting from scratch" they mean "starting over from scratch," meaning throwing out something good enough in the hope of building something perfect.
This article is more about "first mover disadvantage" or "handicap of a head start" where an early implementation is leapfrogged by competitors that don't have legacy baggage.
I think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…
the Eclipse version still had the old DLLs underneath with just a rather superficial Java layer put on top. JVM wrapping compiled C code, yay....
I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.
>Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something?
In a way yes, IBM wanted notes to be an email clone. IBM took cc mail (I think) and shoehorned it into Lotus notes.
To me, that ruined Notes. If I get the versions numbers right, version 3 was great, IBM/Lotus came out with v4, which to me was a bit worse, and each new version was worse than the prior. Instead of focusing on emails, IBM should have focused on making notes servers easy to install and maintain and keep the application portion relevant.
By worse, it was the application portion that degraded. If you saw how cool the applications were with v3, you would wonder why Notes never became a "thing". Even third parties were creating applications for Notes at the time, some were very good. But to me IBM ruined that business by focusing on only Email part of Notes. Now AFAIK, there are no 3rd party applications for notes.
Maybe the company that bought notes from IBM is trying to get back to the roots, but I kind of doubt it.
As much as it was rough in places (debugging an object oriented LotusScript library, connecting to a web service or dealing with a locked out 64GB NSF), I had to admire the email client was fully built as a Notes database and you could see all the source code for yourself so internally Lotus at least believed in it.
Having said that, once you're locked in (and I don't just mean email I mean the hundreds of custom applications your company has built) it's a slog to get off. Meanwhile you still pay the full licence costs whether you have one custom app or a hundred.
Our company has now migrated its Lotus applications to web applications written in Java, but it took us quite a few years.
I am in the middle of it. We might do it till the end of 2026 with only two developers and about 50+ databases. Once we just _ported_ the databases instead of rethinking them, we increased speed by a order of magnitude. We can rethink later on the new platform
It's 2026 and I am still in the middle of porting our notes databases to web. Notes is still the main platform for our applications, we have around 50 or so. I have a lot of respect for what notes is and what it enabled developers to do and I try to bring some ideas of it to the platform I am building. Funny enough today is exactly the day I did the initial commit on the new project one year ago. Happy birthday to my platform i guess.
I was a Lotus Notes developer for more than 10 years. The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. I started with Notes 4.5, IIRC, and ended my time around Notes 8.
The first few years were a little heavy on RAM usage, so people thought it was slow. To give you some context, this was back when 16 MB (megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM was a thing. But as RAM increased, Notes was no longer a problem.
For example, Lotus Notes 8, which I still have on my personal PC, uses about 11 MB just after starting. Then it adds roughly 10 MB for each "app" you open. Today, Outlook alone uses around 170 MB just after starting.
It was incredibly powerful. And migrating a Domino server was incredibly easy. Basically, you just copied the DATA folder. I remember doing this when we migrated from Windows 2000/2003 to AIX.
In the same way, the Notes client was basically a portable app. You could just copy the NOTES and DATA folder, edit notes.ini, and have it running.
So sad to see it go.
> The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing.
It is. And it's the main thing why my boss does not understand why rebuilding databases takes so much time. For him its just a little thing, some fields and off you go...
Unfortunately it is possible for databases to be copied, mixed and matched and deployed somewhere else resulting i a pile of duplicated databases without structure.
That's crazy. I did a Notes migration to a custom Java/Red Hat platform 20 years ago, even at that time it was like "can't believe these guys are on Lotus Notes". I remember Howard Stern used to reference LN on his radio show in the early 90s.
I totally agree. I am very grateful when we migrated off of it.
I worked for Ray Ozzie at Groove, and I still mourn what that could have become. It was, in many ways, a modern reimagining of Notes, but that meant it had the same problem: customers and users thought they were using a product, but they had actually bought a PLATFORM. It was a digital choose your own adventure, but people really wanted a better chat room.
Same thing with Google Wave, really.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/
I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases.
It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.
I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.
I was at a big European company that was also somehow still on Lotus Notes in 2015, for similar reasons. Moving back to Outlook after my 5 years there was a breath of fresh air.. for a time.
I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
> I do have to say Microsoft has spent the last decade "upgrading" their product to be a similarly painful experience though.
Why Microsoft continues to burn goodwill for native Outlook to keep pushing webview "new Outlook" which isn't feature complete is beyond me. Unless we're getting webview Excel, there's no point because you won't be running Office on any other OS anyway.
This goes to my same complaint re: some Apple products. Some stuff is solved.
It's fine, email / photos app / texting apps are solved problems.
Keep upgrading the backends for compatibility / security / whatever, but you do not need to change the UX annually. We're done. Just stop.
I think the point is that Microsoft struggles to hire developers with any knowledge of Windows programming.
This is a problem that one of the richest 10 companies in the world should be able to solve with time & money.
Simply making your product worse is not normally a solution outside monopolies.. ah, I see.
My only interaction with outlook in the last 15+ years has been via web view, as I run linux. It does the job -- indeed I find it better than modern gmail.
> that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial
Lotus Notes allows you to right-click on a "document" and see absolutely all data attached to it, directly in the UI, including access permissions. This can be immensely useful, because not all data could be part of its UI representation.
The closest to this today would be inspecting the JSON data on your browser networking tab to view what your app exchanges with the server, but its much more clunky.
Lotus Notes was underrated imo.
We used it as a combo Helpdesk ticketting, email, wiki/doc tool and it worked so well. It took 20 years for other tools to catch up and webapps still arent as functional.
I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow.
Yeah, Notes had its shared database features, and you could see remnants of IBMers using them at the time, but most such applications been ported to Java CRUD apps. Also Lotus Sametime (it's like Slack) became a much more important collaboration tool.
I don't have many memories of my father but one thing I very vaguely remember is the quirky way it would scramble each character when he entered his password in Lotus Notes.
The fact that Lotus Notes offered attachments with e-mail wasn't as novel as the article suggests, to anyone who had been using uuencode (since 1980) or fidonet (1985).
I have fond memories of filling in time sheets on Lotus Notes. Although it's always an annoying thing to have to do, at least the Notes form that the local IT guy made for it allowed for retroactive changes and comments. Never had any issues communicating with finance over discrepancies or billing. And it synced from basically everywhere, using a 9600bps mobile dial-up connection if needed.
Well, there is another angle here from the Defense sector. Lotus Notes had a big ole backdoor in it: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of technology, as much as it is a quiet kind of informational arms race.
I liked Notes after working at IBM. Until, well, I didn't. That happened at my next job, after I failed to survive a round of IBM layoffs.
Used well, Notes had tremendous power. Enough to make the deficiencies of late-'90s/early-2000s email tolerable.
Used badly, Notes could easily fuel the kind of rant that ended with you being angry the office windows didn't open, because the only sound that might calm your inner rage was your computer's second bounce off the pavement.
But that could describe a lot of IBM software at the time. Often good ideas, but rarely enough structure to protect people from inflicting their own silliness on themselves.
There is a great story about movies and VHS/Betamax.
The movie studios were pretty sure that people would want to buy movies and watch them at home. What they weren't sure about was how to price the movies because this was a brand new market that had never existed before.
This led to the price for a movie on VHS/Beta ranging from $10 to over $100 because no one knew what the actual demand curve looked like.
I feel like the 1990s was a lot like this but with UI/UX. People had opinions on what consumers wanted but the market was expanding so quickly that no one knew for sure. Firms just tried things and, in hindsight, some firms seemed "smarter" because they picked the feature set that customers ended up liking.
Interesting to read it originated as part of PLATO. I used notes at a company in the early oughts. This company was a big user of ibm mainframes. It was bizarre and although it was purported to have all this capability I couldn’t figure out how to do anything with it; like access lotus script. As an inveterate tinkerer, it frustrated me, I assumed I didn’t have permissions or something.
I did a second stint at the same company in the teens and they had moved to outlook.
I used Lotus Notes in the 00s and 10s and greatly preferred it to Outlook. The full featured one, not the OWA version.
Yes, the UI was clunky, but it was quick. It was McMaster-Carr quick. The mail client was never a barrier between you and your emails. These days I miss Outlook, as the new web-based solution we replaced it with is even worse.
Just to add that nowadays once can use HCL Verse for web- or mobile app-based email access to their Lotus Notes email database. It's quite sleek and it works.
So... PLATO user, Notes user and Thunderbird user here with a couple of notes.
> But... after more than 50 years in tech, I still use Thunderbird as my email client. If I could figure out a way to get it to turn off HTML mail I would.
view -> message body as -> plain text :)
Lotus is the best example of why you don't let IBM touch you.
As written in the article, the UI sucked to many to us. Then our corporate migred to GMAIL and never looked back.
And this isn't even the real cult PIM application from Lotus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda https://www.dreamingincode.com/
There was a joke going round when Lotus Notes was still mildly popular:
There's exactly two people who LOVE Lotus Notes. One is the boss, cos he's never wrong, and the other is the Lotus Notes developer/integrator, cos he's getting money.
EVERYONE else in the org goes "Uggghghghhh, not Lotus Notes!"
I joined a company using Notes back in '00. Performed the 4 to 5 upgrade, skipped 6 and went to 7.
We had our "email blast" code in the founder of the companies mail database. When we launched new features or had various announcements, you would log on to Mark's email database and run those features in the drop down. Of course there were various permissions in check that only certain people could do (or view) certain things in the database, but that's where it ended up...
I always thought the data/design replication was cool as well. I had to bake in what I called "relational fields" into the documents to be able to perform some standard relational database type of work, but it was really easy to work with overall. Maybe too easy - as one person mentioned in the thread, there were hundreds of little custom apps built by anyone/everyone in the company, because it was just that easy.
I really liked Lotus Notes.
In the 90’s I worked for a large retailer. Our centralized systems were on IBM mainframes, with some Unix servers for specialized work. We ran a small Unix server - really just a decent PC - in the stores. We had very low end machines running DOS-based terminal emulators for POS, etc.
Senior management wanted a some kind of communication platform for store employees. Something that could handle shared, broadcast comms to all employees, but also individualized comms to store managers, and ideally even questionnaire-like forms for surveys and the like. The entire system had to be secure and tightly controlled, e.g. employee A at store 1 shouldn’t be able to email employee B at store 2.
At some point we’d adopted using Lotus Notes at the HQ as platform de jour. (previously we were all in on PowerBuilder apps, remember that?).
It was no surprise, then, when IBM flew a one of our VPs to Cambridge (or maybe Boca Raton as part of another deal…) and he came back and announced we had purchased something like 50,000 seats for Lotus Notes and were implementing it as a store comm system.
A colleague and I were part of the architectural team. We didn’t have much of a formalized practice in those days, but we’d both been involved in the design and implementation of a lot of key store systems, and we weren’t idiots. We pointed out we’d never tested this sort of thing.
The Lotus team suggested installing Notes in a test store. We pointed out we had no compatible Windows equipment in the store. They suggested accessing Notes remotely. I can’t recall how. Unfortunately, our store networking system was Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite-based. High bandwidth, but also high latency, something like 3-4 seconds. Interactive apps over VSAT just didn’t cut it.
Now my memory of all details is a little fuzzy after 30 years, but as I recollect, Notes could effectively work offline, and then synchronize when back online. This was a cool feature for distributing apps and data. So, of course, the Lotus teams said the obvious, “Just purchase a separate server for Notes in the stores, and we can sync to that, and then all access will be local.”
Did I mention this was Retail?
Suffice it to say when we told Sr Mgmt the solution was going to require purchasing a dedicated server for every location (we were growing like crazy those days), the whole thing came to a screeching halt, and the 50K seat deal was cancelled. Someone lost a nice commission.
At the time I didn’t blame IBM. They were just acting on very incomplete information. Our VP, and old MF guy who now had responsibility for “Distributed Systems” as well, should have had an internal review before committing. I suspect he didn’t get any IBM Christmas cards that year.
Did we adopt standard email for comms? Oh, heck no. We rolled our own Frankenstein implementation of a backend and client, replete with our first C app on MVS. That’s a story for another day.
Notes stayed alive as our internal email, etc client for quite a while longer. I even got it running under Red Hat Linux, courtesy of Wine. Eventually the wheel turned, and we moved to something else. Was it better? No.
An absolute classic of "we've done no requirements analysis at all, but our exec went drinking with the wrong people and that now defines the solution, regardless of the problem".
"Lotes" as we used to call it in my first job.
Yes, it could do all sorts of things, but it never seemed to do any of them well, and it was a horrible email client. Perhaps it was revolutionary in the 80s, but by the 00s it was clunky, heavyweight and painful to use.
In all honesty, I don't think this "concern" is valid anymore. With AI, I firmly believe that if it needs to be done, you should do it. Look at Bun. It took 11 days for them to rewrite it into Rust from Zig and it was all done through AI.
https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust