But like HC, the Notes designer software was turned into an added-cost product, and after that both Notes and HC became the domain of 'IT experts' that knew how to work around the limitations of a rinky-dink platform.
This was all long ago, for most people now Notes is just a terrible email application.
You are right about the level of IT capability of most small shops, maybe I "crippled" would have been better than "destroyed".
But elitist?
Have you ever considered working on your home furnace? There are people who can do these things. The ones who THINK they can do it are Darwin Award winners.
The downside of an amateur rolling their own solution in Notes was not life threatening but it certainly wasn't smart.
Notes gave people who had no idea what they were doing the confidence to build solutions that were fine for personal use but completely unsustainable at even small office scale.
The "experts" who adopted HC and Notes were the ones who did the real damage though. These folks (and I knew a few) were just a step above the guy in the office who refilled the toner in the photocopier. They created half-working systems and then moved on. They didn't have to live with the technical debt they left in their wake.
They set unrealistic expectations for what good IT solutions should cost and left guys like me trying to clean up their mess for years.
In any case, Notes ended up sucking, anyone who saw what happened can toast to that.
Some suggestions. First, if you've typed longer than a minute, make a backup copy of your reply, even go so far as to compose it in a separate text editor, then paste the result into HN. Second, if you encounter the dreaded "link expired" message, select all (Ctrl+A) then copy (Ctrl+C) the content of the entry window, then press browser refresh, then paste (Ctrl+V) the text you just copied. Then click "Reply."
(Trick question, R3 only had ctrl-insert etc OS/2 shortcuts!)
In any case I apologize my paste-buffer foibles denied you my three paragraphs of immense wisdom regarding the good & bad of an obsolete end-user friendly distributed database system that went out of style a couple decades ago.
Lowest common denominator, as they say. When I encounter someone who loses his content on the HN interface, I make some simplifying assumptions. :)