Hacker News Reader

Comment by maguay | Hacker News Reader

Author here, the idea with the title was that Lotus Notes was built at a time when the standards for email especially but also interfaces and keyboard shortcuts were still in flux, and it was built for so many platforms at the same time, all of which contributed to many of the complaints about its interface seeming like a mess. It was starting from scratch with opinionated takes about how the software should work, and that’s a tough spot to build in (and which partly accounts for both the fond and bad memories that both typically surface whenever Lotus Notes is mentioned).

View on HN

You could put it another way: Every time Ray joined a new company he startet to reimplement Plato Notes/the idea of a synced database. Groove Networks did that and its a shame that all thats left at Microsoft is OneDrive. And if you look at the optic of Microsoft Teams, the small bar at the left, the tiles of the app part ... hello Notes my old friend/enemy

SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.

SMTP is not a user interface. It’s just text from RFC821/822

This. Any engineer or manager developing Notes at the time had to be aware of X.400 and X.500, and SMTP. They decided to ignore them. However cool and useful and clumsy Notes was, it was a proprietary walled garden. Lotus and the IBM hawked it, and surely profited. But for the customer it was an expense. Eventually Notes was overtaken by Metcalf’s Law, and the fact that cheaper always wins.

That and, you know, Microsoft.

Sure, but Notes was built for a world where ccMail, MS Mail, and GroupWise were the main workgroup email systems.

Notes followed a similar pattern, with a proprietary "post office" system with optional gateways to larger x.400 / SMTP / UUCP / OfficeVision networks for those who needed them.

Going SMTP (or even x.400)-native from the start might have been a better choice in the long run, but that's only clear in retrospect - it certainly wasn't obvious at the time.

Exchange is funny because it's X.400 native internally, even if recently they dropped external X.400 support

Yeah, Exchange is a good comparator because it shows what the mail aspect of Notes might have been like had it been designed in the mid 90s rather than the late 80s.

It's hard now to appreciate how different corporate IT was from the free-wheeling Internet world. The unexpected popularity of the web really did change everything.

One thing many people don't understand is that IP was not that common of a protocol in intranets for a long time, too

Plus just how much SMTP sucked compared to other systems and only got enough kludges barnacled onto it in semi-transparent way by late 1990s

On the other hand, anyone working on Notes would also be aware that its relationship with email is closer to today's Sharepoint than to today's Exchange. Email was one small aspect of a massive featureset; Notes was ahead of its time in terms of CRM/ERP/one-platform-for-everything that drives modern businesses like Oracle and Salesforce.

in 1990 the internet was something talked about on your BBS as a mystical place you couldn't get access to except as a student. Lots of places had email, but it was unusual for anyone to be connected to any other system. Sometimes a BBS was part of fidonet, but that was rare (and there were many many less known networks).

Even if your typical big company did have a gateway for their internal email to other companies, odds are very few people used that gateway for business. If you wanted to communicate with somebody in a different company you dialed the phone or sent a fax.

Lotus/IBM didn't ignore those standards.

The Notes directory was based on X.500 - it had the same attributes etc. Notes didn't implement DAP, but then almost nobody did, which is why we got LDAP.

There was an add-on connector for X.400 mail. I remember installing it a couple of times. It was fine, if cumbersome due to the nature of X.400. ;-)

They also didn't ignore SMTP. There was a connector for it for Notes 4.0 and 4.1, and starting with Notes 4.5 that connector was bundled in the box. Starting with Release 5 they retired the connector and moved SMTP functionality to be native in the mail router process, and for security they provided a separate SMTP listener task. Both of these were configured in the Notes Directory via Server Documents and Configuration Documents, just like any other feature of the server. If a Domino server wasn't sending or receiving SMTP, it's because its administrator didn't want it to, not because it couldn't.

It wasn't a walled garden, or if it was the wall was very low. By comparison Microsoft's first attempt to dethrone Notes - Exchange Public Folders - was a completely walled garden. And a very well fertilised one which people avoided due to the smell.

But it's OK, Microsoft then gave us SharePoint. The fact that Microsoft's customers rushed to it tells you how bad Public Folders were. So your comment "That and, you know, Microsoft" is much closer to the truth than protocol support.

(Source: I was a Principle Certified Lotus Domino Administrator for multiple versions, and have used & administered Lotus Notes versions from version 3.33 through to 8.5. I worked at a consultancy and installed many, many implementations of Lotus Notes across a number of topologies. I also had an Exchange Server MCP and worked with multiple versions of that too.)

More like 3 years, and in a very niche network that was not generally deployed in companies looking for email outside of certain niches.

Absolutely, but it came several years before MIME for example for formatted emails with attachments, and other things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com