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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

I’m intrigued by the comment that “there is nothing out there with the power and usability that Lotus Notes had back-in-the-day”. I didn’t have the opportunity to experience Lotus Notes personally, would be curious to hear the perspective of someone who used (or developed) the application.

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A surprising remark! The usability of Lotus Notes was so bad that it earned itself an entire section on a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame.

A proper and well-deserved honor.

For some perspective, this was an app developed by 5 core devs that grew to ~125M+ users who by necessity were split across implementations concurrently released for Windows 3/95, NT, OS/2, Mac, Motif, OpenLook, because we were an early enterprise product and needed GTM help offered by each of those platform vendors.

Our tiny dev team chose to prioritize platform breadth thru a "portability layer" developed in a pre-internet pre-browser era, with the constraint that its ~3M+ LoC (in C) had to run in a 250KB working set that grew to a couple MB by the time I left.

Yes, I wish the UI could have been better on each platform. But as a pragmatist I remain proud of the paradigm and its usability given the constraints.

Thanks for the perspective! It's always good to get a look at what the situation looked like to the people who were there at the time. And yes, I can certainly understand that you had to get a product to market within the applicable constraints.

I last used Lotus Notes around 2003, and it didn't even conform to things that had been standard 10-15 years earlier. It felt like going back in time to the 1970s, long before I'd ever used computers.

indeed https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=990

(see also Ray Ozzie answer in other comment about portability layer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26697054 )

I never developed for it, but I had to support it. My recollection is that mailboxes wouldn't really delete stuff, which would cause servers to run out of space. Those mailboxes would then need to be compacted which would cause a multi hour outage for all of the users on the same server.

Notes issues were a nightmare, exceeded only by the problems caused by oversized apple talk and netbios networks, and physical layer problems in networks that predate the "base T" paradigm.

Notes was fun to use if your experience prior to it was Profs/OfficeVision. I had the odd privilege of using it inside IBM in the months before IBM bought Lotus, including writing the worst hack of sendmail.cf macros I thought possible to interchange between Notes, IBM’s RSCS networks, and the internet gateway we had. IBM had been developing a variety of GUI email products, mostly for OS/2, a little bit for Windows, but all in conflict with each other as well as the various OfficeVision flavors for OS/400 and VM/CMS. DEC had their enterprise email for their platforms, there was something for Novell. Notes gave IBM a single unifying platform for email and document sharing / management both internally as well as a product to sell to customers 10,000 seats at a time. In parallel the Internet went from being a thing a very small number of people were using to being the backbone of business, making a lot of the novelty of Notes obsolete. IBM in turn gave Notes the hug of death, loading up so much enterprisiness that Notes 5 felt like bloatware (it had a web server built into each client. And a JVM IIRC).

Things you got with Notes out of the box with minimal systems configuration effort: easy document sharing, easy authentication, entitlement, encryption of documents (and emails) across an organization. Easy provisioning of strong encryption across an organization. I could send digitally signed documents both within IBM and to peers outside IBM fairly easily. I could create a library of security processes for IBM's internet operations, pick out the organizations and people who could have access across the company, and it just worked. For bonus points we got document retention, audit logs, it all just was there out of the box. I didn't need to know ahead of time if someone was using Windows or OS/2 or a Mac.

It's easy to dismiss it all today as horrible bloatware, and as "just" an email tool it was probably overkill. I think too many companies (IBM especially) bought it, set it up, and utterly failed at educating people how to use it (IBMers were notorious for sending around email chains with multiple copies of Freelance or Powerpoint presentations, instead of a link to the presentation in a central repository, partly because IBM's services arm and IBM's CIO didn't want the overhead of managing such things.).

Notes was great until they shoehorned email into it.

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