Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.

If you were a legal secretary WordPerfect was near irreplaceable in a market where the user had transitioned from a typewriter only 5 years ago. Non technical users who has mastered mail merge in WordPerfect would rather beat you up and leave you in the gutter for dead rather than look at Word.

Lotus users were just as fanatical. It’s probably lost to the mists of time but Lotus could be had for Sun workstations and some users who hit the limit of MS-DOS with Lotus switched to that. It was nuts the things people built with that: prop trading in Lotus on a Sun? Why not.

I’d like to see this blogger do Lotus Notes but I suspect unless you’d actually seen the crazy that Notes developers went to you wouldn’t really understand why it elicited audible groans from pre sales staff when they heard the client was a big Notes user but “was running into problems”.

1-2-3 was damn cool though, Notes was written by devils simply to drive men mad.

Author here. I'm not really sure how I could tackle Lotus Notes, as it requires also setting up a backend Domino server (IIRC). That level of enterprise setup strays from my purpose with the blog, as I'm evaluating the software with an eye toward modern-day usability. Maybe there's a simple way to make use of Notes that I don't know about.

When I was manager of a Macintosh network in the early 2000's, we were forced by corporate to use Lotus Notes. Not a single person enjoyed using it, and nobody on my team enjoyed servicing it.

Yo. Firstly, thanks for the trip down memory lane - well written, engaging, fun. My mind is still stuck in those days even after finishing the article, as you can tell from my anachronistic greeting.

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

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

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

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

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

When I worked at IBM in ‘98 Lotus Notes was the default email client for all employees - we referred to it internally as “Bloatus Goats” such was the disdain we had for it.

IBM was using Notes when they acquired us in the mid-2010s. There's probably still production pockets left.

I am not sure triggering a mass trauma by reviving Notes is worthwhile either.

It would be hard to recreate the experience since it relied on a network to get the full experience. Instead of Notes maybe give Multiplan a go. Horrible Microsoft also-ran of a product but interesting to reminisce about.

At the end of my VisiCalc post I show the Multiplan ad that made Dan Fylstra nervous. It will eventually be covered, but not for a while.

It runs out my brain had filed all Lotus Notes experiences away in long term archival and this comment has revived them like a burst damn of both promise and trauma.

The only other comparable stack of the era, maybe slightly later, would be MS Access. When you’d get a call from a prospective client who’d explain they had a member of staff leave and now nobody knows how the Access database works.

“Accidentally load bearing” is an apt term

your trauma is my happy memory - being a lotus notes admin/dev consultant during my studies made me live a very comfortable life as a student!

Just imagine what AI is going to unleash. I can’t wait ha ha!

I wrote software for a company that did legal forms on a PC - used by those same users that mastered WordPerfect for DOS. Those users typically had lower powered PCs even as Windows was slowly gaining traction in the market. Lawyers were slow to upgrade to more powerful PCs when WordPerfect for DOS was their main use. I pitched that Windows was the future but my boss at the time, rightly so, argued that those users could not adopt it on the hardware they typically used.

The compromise was I developed the new software as Windows 3.0 apps and used a text-based rendering compatibility layer called Mewel that implemented the Windows API in text mode for single DOS applications. A few #ifdefs and I could compile for both Win16 and DOS Text mode. This not only allowed me to develop under Windows using the superior at the time Borland compilers, it gave the company a solid footing when the legal world finally came around and wanted Windows software - we had it finished already. Sales slowly transitioned to the Windows version and then it really took off around Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups).

That company was later bought by Pitney Bowes because they were the only company with Windows compatible legal forms software for Windows. Performa (or was it Proforma - I can't remember) was the name of the software.

Back in 1995-1998 or so, Lotus 1-2-3 was the price of a mid-range computer and Wordperfect was about half that. People were seriously invested in them, in several ways.

I remember resisting myself as a kid the change from DOS to Windows versions of apps. Practically I was more productive with my memorised key combos and found it extremely annoying to switch. I also had an Amiga background that "workbench" and mouse point-and-click interfaces in general were meant for design and authoring applications but not for documents. Coming to think of it, I still feel this way - which perhaps is why I'm so naturally inclined to use stuff like vi(m)/emacs and tiled window managers.

I did a lot of study of Lotus Notes circa 2015 when I was thinking about a no-/low-code future. It is still ahead of its time when it comes to having a document database that supports merging but it's unthinkable that you'd build a system like that around email today as today an email system is 99% spam filter and 1% other stuff.

In the days before the web, when bandwidth between sites was limited, Lotus Notes was amazing.

It will beats outlook as a mail client in a lot of ways, such as having actual usable full text search.

Lotus users were just as fanatical.

They were, and Excel users are just as devoted if not more so. We had many people return their shiny new mac because Excel on MacOS is not exactly like Windows. And they were mad about it.

Lotus on a Sun? Why not.

How about 1-2-3 on SCO Unix. And Wordperfect. We had a salesrep (VAR) back in the day who made some scratch in the local legal market with the pitch "why give every secretary an expensive PC when you can buy one PC and a bunch of really cheap Wyse serial terminals". Our support folks came to really hate that guy (start at "you were using a typewriter 5 years ago...now you get to learn the Unix CLI" and it only got worse).

No word processor has ever bettered WordPerfect 5.1.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com