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 Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.
And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!
In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.
Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.
The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
Lotus Notes as a thick client application was a dead end but the Domino server could have lived on as a back end database for web applications, if IBM had any vision. The core technology of a fast, secure NoSQL document database with multi-master replication actually worked really well (at least after they fixed the index corruption race condition bug that I found). But it had a weird stupid limit of (I think) 64GB per file with no automatic sharding support. And they never added XML or JSON as native data types. So it gradually became useless. What a shame.
Look at the history of Lotus Notes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes#History )Development began in 1984. 64MB was large back then, maybe 64GB total was seen, but multiples of 64GB?
I guess Lotus/IBM decided to stop upgrading Lotus Notes as computer limits were increased.
Obligatory Damien Katz Lotus Notes Formula Engine Rewrite (it is a great story but also shows the limits the original devs had to deal with; n.b. scroll down to read Ray Ozzie's comment): see https://web.archive.org/web/20050110035626/http://damienkatz...
I don't remember the details but IBM did increase the Domino file size limit a couple of times. The original limit was even smaller than 64GB. Eventually they gave up and stopped investing in the platform so after a few years it fell hopelessly behind advancements in storage hardware technology.
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.
I am still convinced, that one way to foster professionalism in working e-mail and to facilitate collaboration would be to use e-mail as the interface for a content management system:
- incoming e-mails are categorized by organization sending/topic (until a project can be associated)
- all attachments are stripped off and stored on the server using a hierarchy which the recipient is prompted to update
- outgoing e-mails are treated in the same fashion in reverse, so a link to a file on a server is moved to the CMS and then included as a clickable link
(probably employees would have to have a separate company-sponsored e-mail for insurance correspondence)
Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.
M365 is used only because it is the continuation of MS Office, which had been entrenched in most companies for many decades.
In the beginning, the fact that MS Office was proprietary had nothing to do with communication protocols, but only with the file formats.
The need to convert between proprietary file formats had always existed in an enterprise setting, which is why all such products, including MS Office, had extensive support for importing the file formats of their competitors, so this was never a serious obstacle for adoption.
One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time.
Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
Another major issue was that the first implementation most people saw of it was the email side, and it could be a truly clunky and unpleasant email client. This soured opinions before people delved into the document management and programmability features that email handling were just one use of.
From a technical point of view one of the bonuses I saw was that it used PKI throughout for encryption and such, which very little other software did. Though this was also clunky at times especially for non-technical users (has anyone ever made the use of PKI a smooth process for those who don't care to know the details?). Proper ACL management too rather than more simplistic permissions, but again this could be very clunky.
Though I'm not sure why we are talking entirely in the past tense, while Domino & Notes are not widely used anymore, they are still out there and developed (under the name HLC Notes) with the last release (adding LLM based “AI” features, of course…) was Jun last year and a bugfix update a few months later. My experience with Domino/Notes was in the 00s and early 10s when I was the accidental admin (the only guy who really understood it left) of a mail and document server based on it, hopefully the clunkiness complaints at least have been addressed since then.
There were UX horror stories on the web as well. I guess it is the physical connection of having to start up your Notes application in work and being forced to use poorly designed apps.
I think another difference is that the Cambrian explosion of web apps vying for user attention meant that many web users had experience using both poorly-designed web apps as well as well-designed web apps and could gravitate towards the latter.
Whereas many Notes applications were internal so there was no "survival of the fittest" and the UI toolkit was passable at best. As a result, many Notes users never experienced a well-designed Notes app.
It wasn't that hard to get data out. IBM released a native Windows ODBC driver for Domino databases. Since the underlying database was non-relational you couldn't really use it for SQL queries with complex joins but for basic data export tasks it worked fine.
I'm curious about this part: "The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too."
IIRC LotusScript was basically VB but with a different object model. Why was it a dead end?
Back then a lot of software particularly in the windows world wasn’t very good at talking to anything else. Today everything talks to everything.
Notes already had so many problems it was sunk and lotuscript which as you say was like script. Good but not enough to stop the titanic hitting the iceberg.
Java became available as an alternative to Lotuscript on the backend, I believe in version 5, and Javascript was made available on the frontend around that time. Although maybe I'm thinking of the web version of the frontend.
It wasn't performant, and it didn't scale. I was in a Notes shop in the mid-nineties and it was dog slow for practically everything in a perhaps fifty person company.
Baffling to see this, in every place I've worked at that used Lotus Notes, it was an absolute dog on the system. Clunky, slow, and ground everything else to a halt. And this was the case even on a relatively modern laptop in 2019. Not what I'd call performant at all!
Notes was simple enough to allow folks with no computer science background or even sympathy for the machine to build teetering, badly-performing things.
However, even with a mind towards efficiency and minimalism, performance at roughly hundreds of thousands of documents was extremely elusive.
Notes isn't exactly dead. A couple of years ago I helped a swedish county extract social services data from a system built on it, which is still in use by quite a few other counties.
Among other things I wrote a batch converter from the XML based export format to PDF files packaged according to a standard for digital archives, and we brought on a specialised consultant to help us out inventing an export for system logs.
I expect there to be many products still out there that are actually built on but not advertised as LotusNotes, waiting for someone like me to come along and figure out how to decommission them. As a RAD platform Notes/Domino is apparently highly productive for those that still know how to do it.
I can only really compare it with Access, and between the two, you can get a bit more done a bit more easily with Notes over MS Access, but that's another application that didn't get a clear path to modern usage.
> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.
Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".
But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there can be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.
Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that can be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.
One noted science fiction author, C.J. Cherryh, notes, “It is perfectly okay to write garbage --- as long as you edit brilliantly.”[1] --- for a while I've been wondering if this adage was applicable to Vibe-coding, and your methodology would seem to be a reasonable approach/response to get the benefits of this and to shield against the detriments, and to ensure that a human developer understands the code before committing.
> 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 clarify: for Superego's app there's no human developer oversight, though. At least for the ones the user self-creates. Obviously the user will check that the app they just made works, but they might not spot subtle bugs. I employ some strategies to _decrease the likelihood of bugs_ (I wrote a bit about it here https://pscanf.com/s/351/, if you're interested), but of course only formal verification would ensure there aren't any.
Yes! That's more or less the angle I'm going for. I mean, I don't aim just yet for Emacs-levels of malleability, but at least for something where you can create some useful day to day personal tools.
Thanks for sharing. The demo linked below looked pretty cool, I think this might be a nice complement to Glamorous Toolkit in some of my personal and work flows.
Correct. Admittedly, graphic design is not even my passion, so there's probably lots of room for improvement. But at this point I've grown accustomed to the friendly face. :D
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 areas, but the Outlook UI was much better than the Notes client for email, and together with the marketing push, client-side Notes was finished. Domino could perhaps have survived, but it needed more than the anaemic LotusScript and formula language to get support from developers, and that never happened.
Later versions of Domino also had full Java support, so you could write applications in that language and just use Domino as a back end database. But you still had to do semi-manual memory management, which made it tough for most Java programmers.
Lotus/IBM took an extremely flexible, encrypted, document-oriented database with a powerful RAD client platform and tried to sell it as a competitor to Outlook-Exchange. And Outlook-Exchange won, because as terrible as it was (and it was much worse then than it is now) it still had a better user experience than Notes Mail.
Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.
Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.
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 custom Notes applications the department used regularly.
It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.
The email client was just another notes database. I later worked somewhere that had Notes and only used the email.
Hard to imagine a place adopting Notes and just using the email... email was always kind of a shortcoming in the box. It was there, but wasn't very good imo. I think that Outlook was pretty great up until they started the cloud editions backing M365... I understand why they've changed it how they have, I just think it was better UX for most people before, even if it didn't scale well.
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 before BBSs went mainstream.
Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.
I have such mixed memories regarding Lotus Notes... prior to working with software dev, I'd worked a few contract stints in data entry/lookup because I could type and 10-key very fast. Later I'd work a few different developer contract roles at the same large banking company.
One such contract was to exfiltrate a Notes based application and it's data in to a new application. Apparently integration was the real issue at hand and I can understand why after just dipping my toes into Notes. I can see how easy Notes is to create things, It was nicer than MS Access IMO. But trying to reverse engineer from said apps was painful to say the least. It turns out that the app in question ws so broadly hated, that 3 different groups had already been doing the exact same thing, with 2 others looking into it. They decided to look at the different teams in place and pick one to move forward. It wasn't the team I was on that was kept and so ends my experience with Lotus/IBM Notes.
As a pure employee a few years earlier, Notes was pretty nifty, it was used to integrate just about everything in the company. Definitely gives insight into where a lot of Dilbert jokes came from, definitely from Notes. Though allowing JavaScript in HTML email with early Outlook was a really bad design decision as well.
I had a not great experience with Notes. It was slow and cumbersome. I had become used to Outlook for e-mail, plain simple e-mail. It was fast, light and didn't treat everything as a note. Notes is this heavy app that was slow to load anything with an early 90's aesthetic.
I worked for a large financial (~80,000 employees) that decided to move to Notes from in-house exchange servers well after it was obvious Microsoft had won the productivity wars. Rumor mill suggested it was brought in at the direction of a board member who just so happened to have close interests with IBM.
It set overall productivity back by at least 5 years before executives were forced to make a very decisive and quick move to O365. The reason given were scalability issues, the overwhelming cost of purchasing P-Series hardware (6-digits for one server) by the rack to keep up with demand along with the cost of developers attempting to make something useful for all of the different business needs.
Last I checked they are still stuck with some small, but essential work being diverted through Notes despite the move back to Microsoft.
> Admittedly, IBM buying a popular software product at great expense and running it into the ground is an old story.
IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.
My first dev job was a Notes developer. It really was an amazing piece of tech in hindsight. IMO their real folly was chasing the web trend; at its heart it was a groupware product, and they tried to make it be too many things to everybody. I spent most of my time trying to wrestle it into doing things it wasn't meant to do. It got me extremely proficient with LotusScript which led to other opportunities (Hello ASP!) but the whole thing is a shame. Had they stayed in their lane with the product, it might still be alive and widely used today.
For that matter, had they invested in a web plugin that treated domino as a thin client server, they may also still be around today. Though load balancing would probably take a bit more work.
When the Mac version came out, I was all over it. WordPerfect user at the time, but wird processing was king back then. It would freeze and crash and irritate me. But I loved using it. If anything, it made things interesting for us Mac users as our options to PC software were quite virtually nonexistent.
I joined a company in 2025 an since then I am tasked with porting all Lotus Notes databases to the web (spa+restapi). Funny to see all the comments living in the past as its so present to me.
my favorite part of lotus notes is the password scrambler that prevents people snooping over your shoulder to steal password, I implemented this on my front-end at unsandbox dot com you can test it on teh console page even without an account, the portal itself does not have accounts.
I worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s. It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky. Fat clients that stored tons of data locally weren’t the thing anymore.
When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.
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 security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.
The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.
Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.
At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
I did contract work for a company who made heavy investments into Notes-based applications. The replication capability was super cool. We would setup a new client computer on the corporate LAN, synchronize them to the various Notes databases they needed, then send the computer out to field service reps who would use the computers mostly offline. They updated over a pool of dial-up modems at headquarters. They would run mostly overnight, with the field service reps dialing-in before bed and leaving it to run until it automatically disconnected. Later they used a VPN and dial-up ISPs. It worked astoundingly well.
Their developers moved thru the organization over a period of years making Notes databases out of every paper form-based workflow process they could get their hands on. I lost touch with them and they were acquired by another company, ultimately. I'd love to know what happened to all those custom applications living in Notes. It's hard to think of a platform that could have easily replaced it-- particularly the offline sync / local first portion.
I worked on IBM GS's dedicated Linux team. Notes didn't have a native client, so someone made a secret IBM internal tool call `fetchnotes` - a small binary that converted Lotus X400 email into POP3 or IMAP4 (not sure which), calendar appointments into icals, and contcts into vcard.
It got so popular - you could do your work using Thunderbird instead of Notes - that Windows users wanted to run Linux VMs to run Fetchnotes and not have to use Notes.
I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT.
Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all.
Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
As a user, we used two Domino servers. One was Windows NT, the other was Linux. The Linux one was incredibly performant compared to the Windows one. I think it was an example of good reimplementation using hindsight.
In a past life I was a Domino admin and I ran it on an AS/400. It was great, handled incredible amounts of load, and required little maintenance. The only outage we had was when I accidentally deleted all the databases from the file system. Even that was pretty easy to recover from.
VB6? I mean, you could do some great things with it, and it was pretty easy to do things with. That said, so many people doing things with it didn't really know what they were doing, had no UX understanding and just created slop.
I think half the issues people have with AI today are simply because AI has seen just as much slop in the real world as it has "good, clear code."
Same. There was a running joke that there's exactly two people who love Lotus Notes: The boss, cos they signed off on it and can never be wrong and it shows commitment to productivity increases and nobody got fired for buying IBM and bla bla bla. The other person was the guy implementing it, cos money, money, money!
The boots on the ground cried "ugh, Lotus Notes!" in unison and just had to deal with byzantine key combos, nonstop client crashes/unresponsiveness, and moronic UI decisions some 3-person team made in like 1987.
The development environment was quite good. It did replication and permissions really well. Email was integrated into the workflow. The Domino server was excellent. But people seemed to like the Outlook interface much better and didn't seem to care as much for implementing workflows using email.
I don't recall the client having much crashing and unresponsive issues, but I do recall people finding the UI unintuitive compared to MS products, and of course the custom products built with Notes could vary quite a bit. But so does the web, particularly the early web.
But then you can say the same thing about people building Excel apps and that has been a selling point. Or Powerpoint presentations that people complain about but keep using.
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 Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.
And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!
In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.
Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.
The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
Lotus Notes as a thick client application was a dead end but the Domino server could have lived on as a back end database for web applications, if IBM had any vision. The core technology of a fast, secure NoSQL document database with multi-master replication actually worked really well (at least after they fixed the index corruption race condition bug that I found). But it had a weird stupid limit of (I think) 64GB per file with no automatic sharding support. And they never added XML or JSON as native data types. So it gradually became useless. What a shame.
Look at the history of Lotus Notes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes#History )Development began in 1984. 64MB was large back then, maybe 64GB total was seen, but multiples of 64GB?
I guess Lotus/IBM decided to stop upgrading Lotus Notes as computer limits were increased.
Obligatory Damien Katz Lotus Notes Formula Engine Rewrite (it is a great story but also shows the limits the original devs had to deal with; n.b. scroll down to read Ray Ozzie's comment): see https://web.archive.org/web/20050110035626/http://damienkatz...
I don't remember the details but IBM did increase the Domino file size limit a couple of times. The original limit was even smaller than 64GB. Eventually they gave up and stopped investing in the platform so after a few years it fell hopelessly behind advancements in storage hardware technology.
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.
AirTable? Really? As a Lotus Notes Developer working internally at IBM, I can not see the resemblance.
100%
I am still convinced, that one way to foster professionalism in working e-mail and to facilitate collaboration would be to use e-mail as the interface for a content management system:
- incoming e-mails are categorized by organization sending/topic (until a project can be associated)
- all attachments are stripped off and stored on the server using a hierarchy which the recipient is prompted to update
- outgoing e-mails are treated in the same fashion in reverse, so a link to a file on a server is moved to the CMS and then included as a clickable link
(probably employees would have to have a separate company-sponsored e-mail for insurance correspondence)
> Lotus Notes died because the web took over
Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.
M365 is proprietary and it is widely used by companies
M365 is used only because it is the continuation of MS Office, which had been entrenched in most companies for many decades.
In the beginning, the fact that MS Office was proprietary had nothing to do with communication protocols, but only with the file formats.
The need to convert between proprietary file formats had always existed in an enterprise setting, which is why all such products, including MS Office, had extensive support for importing the file formats of their competitors, so this was never a serious obstacle for adoption.
It’s all that survived.
Yep... Movie maker, Clippy, MSN Music, Encarta, Office accounting, Money, Response Point, hell TECHNET.
One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time.
Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
Another major issue was that the first implementation most people saw of it was the email side, and it could be a truly clunky and unpleasant email client. This soured opinions before people delved into the document management and programmability features that email handling were just one use of.
From a technical point of view one of the bonuses I saw was that it used PKI throughout for encryption and such, which very little other software did. Though this was also clunky at times especially for non-technical users (has anyone ever made the use of PKI a smooth process for those who don't care to know the details?). Proper ACL management too rather than more simplistic permissions, but again this could be very clunky.
Though I'm not sure why we are talking entirely in the past tense, while Domino & Notes are not widely used anymore, they are still out there and developed (under the name HLC Notes) with the last release (adding LLM based “AI” features, of course…) was Jun last year and a bugfix update a few months later. My experience with Domino/Notes was in the 00s and early 10s when I was the accidental admin (the only guy who really understood it left) of a mail and document server based on it, hopefully the clunkiness complaints at least have been addressed since then.
Yes, I totally agree with this. Because Notes Email was just another app, it didn’t have some of the specific polish that even Outlook had.
This. A good Notes developer with decent UX chops could create really powerful, ROI driving applications but those guys where few and far between.
I don't entirely buy it, If true that should have killed the web, perhaps the web survived because it was not a product.
There were UX horror stories on the web as well. I guess it is the physical connection of having to start up your Notes application in work and being forced to use poorly designed apps.
I think another difference is that the Cambrian explosion of web apps vying for user attention meant that many web users had experience using both poorly-designed web apps as well as well-designed web apps and could gravitate towards the latter.
Whereas many Notes applications were internal so there was no "survival of the fittest" and the UI toolkit was passable at best. As a result, many Notes users never experienced a well-designed Notes app.
Do you know, does anyone still have copies of Notes versions 1 and 2?
I’ve seen Notes 3 clients and servers on the usual abandonware sites, but never any pre-3.x version
There were many reasons Notes died.
It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export.
Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems.
It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox.
Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes.
The web did many things better than notes there much much overlap.
The UI was clunky in some ways.
Some of the concepts like replication were just too much too early for many people to grasp.
SQL rose in the corporate world chipping away further at notes.
The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too.
Unstructured document databases were very polarizing sine people hated them with a passion.
The parent company Lotus main product 1-2-3 which ad dominated the spreadsheet world got smashed by Excel.
There’s more reasons too but there’s enough there you can see the doom of Notes.
It wasn't that hard to get data out. IBM released a native Windows ODBC driver for Domino databases. Since the underlying database was non-relational you couldn't really use it for SQL queries with complex joins but for basic data export tasks it worked fine.
I suppose I only really use Notes pre IBM.
I'm curious about this part: "The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too."
IIRC LotusScript was basically VB but with a different object model. Why was it a dead end?
Well I suppose the whole thing was a dead end.
Back then a lot of software particularly in the windows world wasn’t very good at talking to anything else. Today everything talks to everything.
Notes already had so many problems it was sunk and lotuscript which as you say was like script. Good but not enough to stop the titanic hitting the iceberg.
Java became available as an alternative to Lotuscript on the backend, I believe in version 5, and Javascript was made available on the frontend around that time. Although maybe I'm thinking of the web version of the frontend.
With everything as a note, how was it so performant? How did it scale so well?
It was basically NoSQL before NoSQL.
Each note was just a record, but with no schema. Schemas were imposed at the UI layer by forms and at indexing time by views.
Related [0]
[0]. https://www.wired.com/2012/12/couchdb/
It wasn't performant, and it didn't scale. I was in a Notes shop in the mid-nineties and it was dog slow for practically everything in a perhaps fifty person company.
Baffling to see this, in every place I've worked at that used Lotus Notes, it was an absolute dog on the system. Clunky, slow, and ground everything else to a halt. And this was the case even on a relatively modern laptop in 2019. Not what I'd call performant at all!
Notes was simple enough to allow folks with no computer science background or even sympathy for the machine to build teetering, badly-performing things.
However, even with a mind towards efficiency and minimalism, performance at roughly hundreds of thousands of documents was extremely elusive.
Notes isn't exactly dead. A couple of years ago I helped a swedish county extract social services data from a system built on it, which is still in use by quite a few other counties.
Among other things I wrote a batch converter from the XML based export format to PDF files packaged according to a standard for digital archives, and we brought on a specialised consultant to help us out inventing an export for system logs.
I expect there to be many products still out there that are actually built on but not advertised as LotusNotes, waiting for someone like me to come along and figure out how to decommission them. As a RAD platform Notes/Domino is apparently highly productive for those that still know how to do it.
I can only really compare it with Access, and between the two, you can get a bit more done a bit more easily with Notes over MS Access, but that's another application that didn't get a clear path to modern usage.
I'm building an app that is, in a way, a modern take on Lotus Notes (https://github.com/superegodev/superego), and I couldn't feel this more:
> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.
Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".
But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there can be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.
Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that can be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.
¹ https://www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-software
One noted science fiction author, C.J. Cherryh, notes, “It is perfectly okay to write garbage --- as long as you edit brilliantly.”[1] --- for a while I've been wondering if this adage was applicable to Vibe-coding, and your methodology would seem to be a reasonable approach/response to get the benefits of this and to shield against the detriments, and to ensure that a human developer understands the code before committing.
1 - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/398754-it-is-perfectly-okay...
> 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 clarify: for Superego's app there's no human developer oversight, though. At least for the ones the user self-creates. Obviously the user will check that the app they just made works, but they might not spot subtle bugs. I employ some strategies to _decrease the likelihood of bugs_ (I wrote a bit about it here https://pscanf.com/s/351/, if you're interested), but of course only formal verification would ensure there aren't any.
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.
If you squint, Notion and Coda are childish versions of Lotus Notes.
Just watched your demo here:
https://youtu.be/vB3xo2qn_g4?si=y2udkdfezSR9ktUO
Pretty cool!
I like that you can generate new programs from within the system.
That's something I miss with Notion. I basically want a Notion but extensible and malleable like Emacs.
Yes! That's more or less the angle I'm going for. I mean, I don't aim just yet for Emacs-levels of malleability, but at least for something where you can create some useful day to day personal tools.
Thanks for sharing. The demo linked below looked pretty cool, I think this might be a nice complement to Glamorous Toolkit in some of my personal and work flows.
Is there a story behind the old guy in the logo?
It must be a nod to Freud (i.e. id, ego, and super ego)
Correct. Admittedly, graphic design is not even my passion, so there's probably lots of room for improvement. But at this point I've grown accustomed to the friendly face. :D
Many people seem to associate "ego" with negative connotation.
The name gives a weird vibe. But, it's free and it's your project so, whatever. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Yeah, I agree, though it wants to be slightly provocative as well: it's all about you, your data, your software, your rights.
Ah... Ok, that makes sense.
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 areas, but the Outlook UI was much better than the Notes client for email, and together with the marketing push, client-side Notes was finished. Domino could perhaps have survived, but it needed more than the anaemic LotusScript and formula language to get support from developers, and that never happened.
Later versions of Domino also had full Java support, so you could write applications in that language and just use Domino as a back end database. But you still had to do semi-manual memory management, which made it tough for most Java programmers.
Lotus/IBM took an extremely flexible, encrypted, document-oriented database with a powerful RAD client platform and tried to sell it as a competitor to Outlook-Exchange. And Outlook-Exchange won, because as terrible as it was (and it was much worse then than it is now) it still had a better user experience than Notes Mail.
Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.
Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.
Notes was so, so awful. I miss a lot of cool things from that era, but Notes is not one of them.
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 custom Notes applications the department used regularly.
It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.
The email client was just another notes database. I later worked somewhere that had Notes and only used the email.
Hard to imagine a place adopting Notes and just using the email... email was always kind of a shortcoming in the box. It was there, but wasn't very good imo. I think that Outlook was pretty great up until they started the cloud editions backing M365... I understand why they've changed it how they have, I just think it was better UX for most people before, even if it didn't scale well.
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 before BBSs went mainstream.
Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.
I have such mixed memories regarding Lotus Notes... prior to working with software dev, I'd worked a few contract stints in data entry/lookup because I could type and 10-key very fast. Later I'd work a few different developer contract roles at the same large banking company.
One such contract was to exfiltrate a Notes based application and it's data in to a new application. Apparently integration was the real issue at hand and I can understand why after just dipping my toes into Notes. I can see how easy Notes is to create things, It was nicer than MS Access IMO. But trying to reverse engineer from said apps was painful to say the least. It turns out that the app in question ws so broadly hated, that 3 different groups had already been doing the exact same thing, with 2 others looking into it. They decided to look at the different teams in place and pick one to move forward. It wasn't the team I was on that was kept and so ends my experience with Lotus/IBM Notes.
As a pure employee a few years earlier, Notes was pretty nifty, it was used to integrate just about everything in the company. Definitely gives insight into where a lot of Dilbert jokes came from, definitely from Notes. Though allowing JavaScript in HTML email with early Outlook was a really bad design decision as well.
Lotus Domino (the Lotus Notes server) still lives on as HCL Domino: https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/web-servers/hcl-domi...
San Francisco's school board still uses it: https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/Public
(Note the .nsf extension, which signifies a Notes database)
I had a not great experience with Notes. It was slow and cumbersome. I had become used to Outlook for e-mail, plain simple e-mail. It was fast, light and didn't treat everything as a note. Notes is this heavy app that was slow to load anything with an early 90's aesthetic.
I worked for a large financial (~80,000 employees) that decided to move to Notes from in-house exchange servers well after it was obvious Microsoft had won the productivity wars. Rumor mill suggested it was brought in at the direction of a board member who just so happened to have close interests with IBM.
It set overall productivity back by at least 5 years before executives were forced to make a very decisive and quick move to O365. The reason given were scalability issues, the overwhelming cost of purchasing P-Series hardware (6-digits for one server) by the rack to keep up with demand along with the cost of developers attempting to make something useful for all of the different business needs.
Last I checked they are still stuck with some small, but essential work being diverted through Notes despite the move back to Microsoft.
> Admittedly, IBM buying a popular software product at great expense and running it into the ground is an old story.
IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.
They took the Computer Associates (CA) playbook and ran with it.
But IBM targeted companies that techies had heard of, while CA seemed to go after only enterprise software that ran in the backoffice.
My first dev job was a Notes developer. It really was an amazing piece of tech in hindsight. IMO their real folly was chasing the web trend; at its heart it was a groupware product, and they tried to make it be too many things to everybody. I spent most of my time trying to wrestle it into doing things it wasn't meant to do. It got me extremely proficient with LotusScript which led to other opportunities (Hello ASP!) but the whole thing is a shame. Had they stayed in their lane with the product, it might still be alive and widely used today.
For that matter, had they invested in a web plugin that treated domino as a thin client server, they may also still be around today. Though load balancing would probably take a bit more work.
I have certification in Lotus Notes, I quite liked it. Fairly simple to create an application but not being open source was a problem.
When the Mac version came out, I was all over it. WordPerfect user at the time, but wird processing was king back then. It would freeze and crash and irritate me. But I loved using it. If anything, it made things interesting for us Mac users as our options to PC software were quite virtually nonexistent.
I joined a company in 2025 an since then I am tasked with porting all Lotus Notes databases to the web (spa+restapi). Funny to see all the comments living in the past as its so present to me.
I haven't even seen Notes in the wild since around 2008 or so...
my favorite part of lotus notes is the password scrambler that prevents people snooping over your shoulder to steal password, I implemented this on my front-end at unsandbox dot com you can test it on teh console page even without an account, the portal itself does not have accounts.
I have been waiting for someone to open source lotus notes, sadly the time is probably past.
I worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s. It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky. Fat clients that stored tons of data locally weren’t the thing anymore.
When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.
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 security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.
The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.
Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.
At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
I did contract work for a company who made heavy investments into Notes-based applications. The replication capability was super cool. We would setup a new client computer on the corporate LAN, synchronize them to the various Notes databases they needed, then send the computer out to field service reps who would use the computers mostly offline. They updated over a pool of dial-up modems at headquarters. They would run mostly overnight, with the field service reps dialing-in before bed and leaving it to run until it automatically disconnected. Later they used a VPN and dial-up ISPs. It worked astoundingly well.
Their developers moved thru the organization over a period of years making Notes databases out of every paper form-based workflow process they could get their hands on. I lost touch with them and they were acquired by another company, ultimately. I'd love to know what happened to all those custom applications living in Notes. It's hard to think of a platform that could have easily replaced it-- particularly the offline sync / local first portion.
Love stories like this about bespoke systems that might still be running out there somewhere.
I worked on IBM GS's dedicated Linux team. Notes didn't have a native client, so someone made a secret IBM internal tool call `fetchnotes` - a small binary that converted Lotus X400 email into POP3 or IMAP4 (not sure which), calendar appointments into icals, and contcts into vcard.
It got so popular - you could do your work using Thunderbird instead of Notes - that Windows users wanted to run Linux VMs to run Fetchnotes and not have to use Notes.
I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT.
Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all.
Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
What platform did you run Domino on?
If Domino was solid, I'd imagine Domino on AS/400 was near unstoppable.
As a user, we used two Domino servers. One was Windows NT, the other was Linux. The Linux one was incredibly performant compared to the Windows one. I think it was an example of good reimplementation using hindsight.
In a past life I was a Domino admin and I ran it on an AS/400. It was great, handled incredible amounts of load, and required little maintenance. The only outage we had was when I accidentally deleted all the databases from the file system. Even that was pretty easy to recover from.
It was. I did some I.T. consulting in the Fortune 500 and a few ran Notes on the AS/400.
I had an AS/400 but unfortunately never got to run it on that. (it was a JD Edwards server for the ERP system)
Nope it was on good old winNT 4
I think we may have upgraded it to windows server 2000 at one point as well.
I remember that the disk partition it ran on ran out of disk space once.. it kept ticking along. just didnt let users make changes. Amazing stuff.
This looks like the Lisp Curse
I would rather use LotusNotes again than the modern Microsoft stack.
Today's C# isn't bad... assuming you aren't overcomplicating the world through excess abstraction.
They turned it into a horrible terrible email client.
[dead]
I see lots of em dash in this article.
It was bad. There was a dedicated site called lotusnotessucks.com or something like that. It does not exist anymore but here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...
Here's a quote from the article. Hopefully this helps the people with rose tinted glasses get some perspective...
>Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?
VB6? I mean, you could do some great things with it, and it was pretty easy to do things with. That said, so many people doing things with it didn't really know what they were doing, had no UX understanding and just created slop.
I think half the issues people have with AI today are simply because AI has seen just as much slop in the real world as it has "good, clear code."
It's like the two types of languages: the ones everybody complains about, and the ones nobody uses.
Same. There was a running joke that there's exactly two people who love Lotus Notes: The boss, cos they signed off on it and can never be wrong and it shows commitment to productivity increases and nobody got fired for buying IBM and bla bla bla. The other person was the guy implementing it, cos money, money, money!
The boots on the ground cried "ugh, Lotus Notes!" in unison and just had to deal with byzantine key combos, nonstop client crashes/unresponsiveness, and moronic UI decisions some 3-person team made in like 1987.
I have opinions.
The development environment was quite good. It did replication and permissions really well. Email was integrated into the workflow. The Domino server was excellent. But people seemed to like the Outlook interface much better and didn't seem to care as much for implementing workflows using email.
I don't recall the client having much crashing and unresponsive issues, but I do recall people finding the UI unintuitive compared to MS products, and of course the custom products built with Notes could vary quite a bit. But so does the web, particularly the early web.
But then you can say the same thing about people building Excel apps and that has been a selling point. Or Powerpoint presentations that people complain about but keep using.
As a email client.