[howsta]

Founder of Airtable here--we did look at Lotus Notes as an interesting historical precedent, though of course we've also invented from scratch in many cases, and being web-based and collaborative by default is a huge wedge for us in terms of adoption virality. I admit I'm too young to have used Lotus Notes but we did buy an old Lotus Notes guidebook, as well as looked up old Infoworld and other magazine articles (Google Books indexes those magazines!) about Notes, dBase, and other products in the genre : ).

[andrewstuart]

Cool to see the founder here.

People loved or hated Notes.

It was way, way ahead of its time. It was really the very first system that integrated the concept or networking, users, groups, a replicated database, nosql unstructured data, form building and in built security with a sophisticated GUI.

[prepend]

I hated it because it was hard to get data out of it and no way as a user to automate tasks.

I think it was great if you had departmental developers building stuff, but I hated not being able to make my own forms. And I hated having to open up Notes in 2010 to click a procurement button or a timesheet button. If it was web-based (or had an api) I could have just scripted requests to do the same thing.

[cutenewt]

Maybe more proof that there's nothing new under the sun. I remember looking at this space and how so much was inspired by 80s tools like FileMaker and Hypercard.

[koheripbal]

Any thoughts on creating hierarchical lists? I find flat lists can be done on a shared Google sheet.