Original Spec for Lotus Notes (1984) [pdf]

A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. I worked for a 300-ish employee company spread over 4 countries and 2 US states around 2001-2004 and we used Notes for all internal document management, email and later even web content management. The thing just quietly kept everything in sync; distributed servers, mobile users and their laptops and traditional desktops, and never lost a byte of it despite flaky VPN connections, ISP service, change conflicts, abusive use cases, multiple Notes client and server versions, etc.

I haven't dealt with any Notes systems in years, but my memories of the one time I did are largely good. The client had its quirks and Lotus could have done themselves a big service if they had adopted more conventional behavior and terminology, but the end user experience -- judging by easy adoption by new employees -- wasn't as bad as is frequently alleged.

Notes is a real mixed bag. On the plus side, its open-ended, fully customizable document database is a phenomenally powerful tool for creating information management systems that map very closely to the unique workflows and structures that arise in any business. As an expression of the promise of office automation, it's pretty compelling.

On the other hand, it's the world's worst email & calendar client and much of its bad reputation stems from users having to put up with that when there's really no need for it ever to have been installed. (EDIT: given that, it's interesting to see the prominence that email receives in the design doc. I'd always thought it was a post-Lotus bolt on, but it was a day zero consideration.)

But far, far worse than that is the stuff you don't realize when you embark on the Notes path. It's a very powerful tool, but a dangerous one too: I saw a telecoms company in the late 90s/early 2000s blow up partly because it relied too heavily on a custom Notes solution that became prohibitively expensive to change as the business evolved. Management got hooked on formalizing all their business processes inside Notes, seduced by the promise of total transparency and operational control. The system got big, and Notes scales badly. Reporting runs that took a few minutes with a few hundred attributed documents in 1998 took over four hours by 2000; I helped put in a SQL Server instance to create a relationally structured copy of the unstructured attributed documents to reduce that time, but of course that was more money. The poor chap that owned the company ended up having a stroke and the company was wound down. That's an anecdote, but on the other two occasions I've seen Notes used for its real value (as a document DB with associated processes) it's ended up in a similar, sprawling and unmaintainable end state.

I guess one way to think of it is as a kind of Excel for processes and documents. End users can do things with it very easily - you can set stuff up that exactly reflects the flow of information and control processes unique to a business, and that's a great tool for helping a business mature and control its operational risks - but its limitations and the systemic risk it introduces are not well understood and only become apparent when you've gone too far with it.

The timelessness of the promises made in this specification are very interesting to me. A more idealistic (and younger) version of me would love to help build an open platform that could fulfill a lot of these promises, likely just because it's fun to build platforms. No doubt it such an effort would also be doomed to relative obscurity, not unlike the other various collaboration platforms that come to mind (Microsoft Exchange as an application platform, FileMaker, and of course, Notes itself).

I spent my years struggling with Notes. See the second paragraph below, for what I'm told is some balance.

In good part, this consisted of problems and cruftiness with the UI, and Management's use of it for a blizzard of very verbose, fragmented, and therefore difficult and time-consuming to navigate documentation. E.g. what should have been one quarter or half page document -- at most -- ended up spread, sentence by sentence, checkbox by checkbox, around 30 - 50 Notes documents within an often overwhelming hierarchy of template documents only sparsely completed to alleviate the most annoying and insistent badgering of project managers and the like -- the only ones to really seem to have any oversight over the whole documentation package and to feel any ownership of same. (The rest of us? Hate, hate, hate... Not for the idea of documentation, but for the reality that could make it more difficult than the project itself.)

Eventually, I came across a description of Notes that commiserated with this state of things but also said, 'Hey, wait. You should understand that the technical design and underpinnings of Notes itself -- its data management -- was actually quite solid and innovative.

And... I guess I could see that, in terms of how it generally held up to the abuse of an entire, large corporation's daily use and abuse of it. And how it could work well, when somebody clue-full laid their hands on it.

I'm not in a position to speak to this, further. Except to say that there are a few documents out there -- that I skimmed, a long time ago -- that apparently paint a pretty good picture of this upside of Notes. Those in the know describe them as interesting and edifying.

P.S. If and as I recall, Kapor was also responsible for Lotus 1,2,3 , which was initially far ahead of Excel and had a perspective on data representation that took a long time to propagate to its competitors.

I appreciated the nosql-like database model of a "notes" and "views". It inspired the way I managed data for the remainder of my career. I believe the concept of "tags" of flickr or "labels" of gmail are Notes-inspired concepts.

Maybe it doesn't scale well for late 90's internet-enabled desktops, but Ray Ozzie developed software with a solid 15-year shelf life.

I'm happy to have had the few years experience as a lotus notes developer, and also happy to have it in my past.

The date on Mitch and Ray's spec is December 1984 and we designed most of the core parts of Notes soon after that in 1985.

Sorry to hear that many of you had to deal with our 1985 design choices all through the subsequent years. But I think many of the commenters here are maybe forgetting or not aware of what personal computing and networking were like 32 years ago: Windows 1.0 (beta), EGA graphics (640×350 w/16 colors), 640KB main memory (kilobytes not megabytes), Ethernet/TokenRing LANs, dial-up 9600 baud modems (kilobits/sec not megabits/sec or gigabits/sec). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0

The Internet was just being formed out of the Arpanet and other research networks. Mail services and protocols like SMTP and POP3 didn't exist.

We worked with Ron Rivest to define BSAFE and build the first real commmercial product with public key crypto.

As far as the Notes database (again circa 1984): it seemed obvious to us, especially Ray, that relational was not the best model, but we took endless grief for not using a relational database.

In hindsight, we obviously could have made quite a few better decisions and evolved the design and code more quickly, but as one commenter pointed out, we were trying to maintain app and data compatibility across multiple client and server software and hardware environments that were continually evolving around us.

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

I've seen Lotus Notes client installation's folder being migrated from Windows XP to Windows 7 then onto RHEL and finally onto macOS.

Suffice to say that all of the user settings were preserved and the data was readily usable on each platform. This happened over the span of 10 years.

Given the observation, I wonder how many other applications with similar complexity would last even one migration, let alone rolling migration across 4 completely different platforms.

"Notes is a document creation, editing, and storage system."

Strangely, at the last (and only, thankfully) place where I had to use Notes, it was not used for that purpose. Instead, it was used as an e-mail system and an inventory management tool.

I wonder if anyone wrote a free or open source version of Lotus Notes? I think IBM stopped supporting it after a while. It is a shame that IBM bought out Lotus and couldn't keep the Lotus software current and up to date.

A local newspaper used Lotus Notes to serve up stories on their website, before Python Django replaced it.

It's hard to convey how forward thinking Notes was back in the day - a replicated, document oriented database with encryption and visual user oriented programming.

Some loved it, some hated it but it was certainly unique.

I'm happy not to be using it any more but I thank Lotus Notes for paying my rent and food bills for a long time.

Whilst Notes had it's frustrations (mainly as a user revolving around its insistence on using its own terminology and layout for everything), I thought it had strong points that made it an excellent tool for knowledge management.

Notes databases were easily replicated for offline use and encrpyted for data security (when I was using it was back in the mid 2000's before Full disk encryption became common).

In the days of poor Internet connectivity this made it immensely valuable for travelling consultants who could easily take large quantities of information on the move with them and synch it when in the office.

These days for end users I guess OneNote comes closest to that, but even there I don't think it has all the features that Notes did...

I cut my teeth on Lotus Notes straight out of school. It was way ahead of its time and anyone who knows about Ray Ozzie knows that dude puts out good kit. Bill Gates didn't make him CTO for nothing.

Anyone who reduced it to a email client didn't understand where its true powered lied which was workflow and document / record management. If you knew how to combine the ACL with forms, views, and agents you could build some pretty amazing apps really quickly. Unfortunately it was always known as a email client which was actually just a Lotus Notes App.

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

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

Things Notes solved years before its time include:

1. distributed databases everywhere even over a crappy pipe

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

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

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

5. OS independence!

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

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

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

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

Considering the relatively positive comments here and its prominence, it is fairly interesting that there are no notable FOSS alternatives for Notes, not at least any that I'd know of. I suppose writing corporate software is not that sexy, but on the other hand I'd imagine document management is something that would be a itch to be scratched even in personal use (it certainly is for me)

I would be interested to see the original spec for Lotus Agenda. That product still has a legion of fans extolling its virtues online. And it was a DOS product.

I used to curse our Notes based document management system with custom approval workflow... Until it was replaced with something better. Man do I miss Notes!! It may have been slow at times, but it did a great job at it's core purpose.

Wish I'd seen this doc before I started using Notes - would have given me a much clearer perspective (although... I might have 'grokked' as much at such a young age).

Notes left a bad taste in my mouth in 96-97, as I was working at a company doing custom Notes app (not originally, but we morphed in to Notes after I started). I was tasked with doing Notes app customization and creation on and for laptops with Win95 and a whopping 8m of RAM. Doing anything in Notes was painful. We had one project where we got... 32m I think, and that was certainly bearable, but I was canned shortly after that...

As many people here are saying, Notes was at its core a remarkable achievement for its time. One thing that kept it from more widespread adoption as an application platform, I believe, was the lack of any synchronization or atomicity model. The open "multimaster" replication model was ahead of its time in allowing offline updates, but every application had to reinvent any needed reconciliation logic more or less from scratch, and with few helpful tools.

If Notes could have done more to solve that problem, I think people would have flocked to it as a distributed application platform.

Oh boy, Notes. I worked at IBM last year. I had, in turns, a frustration, a revulsion, and finally a great admiration for Lotus Notes. Not for any practical reasons—the implementation leaves much to be desired. But in the abstract? It's kind of cool.

See, Lotus Notes is essentially (the modern conception of a) web browser: an MDI navigation chrome, plus rendering engine, plus VM runtime. Each time you open a Notes "document" (like an HTML file), the code embedded in it is run through the VM to create a DOM, which is rendered by the rendering engine and displayed in the window/tab representing the document. One of the common DOM element types is a text link, and Notes documents frequently link to other .nsf files, which then are downloaded and which then open in Notes in new windows/tabs.

The one crucial thing that Notes has over web-browsers, though, that made all the difference in how the two ended up evolving, is that in Notes, each Notes document has a remote database associated with it, that the document can read from and write to.

It's a bit like a site or mobile app that uses Parse or Firebase: there's no need to write backend logic; you just write your client, and then point it at a generic app backing-store server. In this case, the backing-store server is called Lotus Domino.

Like Parse or Firebase, Domino handles authenticating clients. For each Domino server a Notes client is signed into, they have an "identity file" (PGP keypair) the server recognizes as "them", and which their Notes client uses to sign any documents it authors (where an update sent by a document to a Domino server is sent as a small signed document.)

This is in a lot of ways similar to how browsers use TLS client certificates, but lighter-weight, in a similar way to how e.g. an Apt repository's pre-signed packages are lighter-weight than HTTPS. In TLS, a piece of data will lose its origin once it passes out the other end of a TLS tunnel, and so the server must make a metadata record of who it was talking to, and vouch for the data itself (with another TLS tunnel) when someone else requests it. With pre-signed documents, the server can be a dumb store-and-forward server, and the documents will always just "stay" signed by whoever first created them, without needing un-wrapping and re-wrapping on every transmission.

And that means that, unlike Parse or Firebase where linearization is done on the server, a Notes document can just download all the store-and-fowarded update message-documents representing its database, and then linearize them itself, using the Notes client's own configured trust settings to decide what operations in the event stream were authorized changes, and then the document's own merge policies to decide how to linearize the data (i.e. what fields are CRDTs, what fields are last-write-wins, etc.)

Then, finally, you can understand what is going on when Lotus Notes opens up and shows you what looks to be an email client: it's a Notes document (like a web-app) syncing down a Domino database full of signed update-messages from other Notes clients (one of which can be an SMTP gateway server, allowing messages to get pushed in from outside the Notes system.) The email client document chooses to represent its (considered-authorized) update-messages as individual email messages in a list—but some of them are also other things, like e.g. edits to previously-sent messages.

Each signed update-message might just contain a plaintext message, or it might effectively be a publish-event pointing the Notes client at a Notes document. The email-client document is responsible for deciding how to render the plaintext messages when you focus those; but if you focus a message representing a reference to a Notes document, it just downloads/syncs that Notes document into your local database and then the preview pane displays it in the Notes equivalent of an <iframe>, allowing it to run all its own code.

So, you could picture the default Lotus Notes email client as being less like Gmail, and more like Slack: it syncs a history of update-messages, some of which are modification-events for real "messages". Like Slack, you can upload files "to the service" and then just send references to them to other users in your team. And some of these files could be small, self-contained HTML5 apps, talking to a service like Firebase.

The key differences, then, are that 1. you actually interact with such documents within the client (so, picture if you could post HTML documents into Slack that would be displayed as an <iframe>); and 2. the messaging service itself is hosting the Firebase-alike functionality, such that every "app" built with the Firebase-alike functionality gets an implicit User model mapped to the user of the messaging app.

When described like that, it actually sounds a bit less braindead than Google Wave, doesn't it?

Notes got me over my email checking addiction. Having to use it at work I checked my email twice a day rather than 20 times, since I hated the interface. I guess that made me way more productive in itself. People started using unofficial channels instead such as skype messaging for some communications or just speaking in person.

What replaced Notes for doing custom workflows? Despite whatever hate or legitimate criticism it received, Notes was really good at letting you putting together workflows. And the Domino servers with their ability to replicate databases was really nice.

This spec doesn't mention it, but Notes was arguably ahead of its time w/ respect to cryptography. The political climate of the time, w/ respect to export restrictions, certainly didn't work in the product's favor.

There's some more good background here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistory...

A quick search out of curiosity brought this:

http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ibmnotes

My first programming gig was Lotus Notes developer (v4.3). It was ahead of its time

Somewhat related: I came across the visicalc documentation from 1981: http://toastytech.com/manuals/VisiCalc%201.1.pdf

Page 123 of the pdf (page 3-3/3-4 ) is a massive state machine showing all of the commands and modes.

Ah, Notes. NoSQL before it was cool to be NoSQL.

Strangely, the words "spawn" and "satan" do not appear anywhere in this document.