[kcplate]

> though soon overshadowed by the new hotness that was Lotus Notes.

The fun thing about that statement is I have no idea whether it was sarcastic or heartfelt. I have never found a more polarizing piece of software in my long career. It’s a love or hate there and doesn’t seem to be any “meh” opinion. (I was in the hate camp and thankfully my life has been Notes free for over 15 years)

[chiph]

Ray Ozzie shows up here occasionally. I disparaged Notes a while back and he set me straight - the backend is pretty elegant. However the front end was designed to be cross-platform and as a result is a lowest common denominator UI. It's not attractive, but it worked nearly everywhere. Since that is what people see, that's the impression they get.

Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18320592

[kcplate]

I’ll admit to just being a front end user of the platform only so I am sure it framed my opinion—the UX was dreadful. The other thing that set the bad taste it was brought in as the corporate email platform by a company that acquired us and since I lead IT for our org (now a division) and corporate IT was across country and 3 hours behind, we caught the brunt of all the user complaints and support for the first half of the day until the help desk opened up.

[methods21]

Lotus Notes is criminally underrated. I don't think folks gave credit to the replication engine. I was so stoked when Ray O was going to MS and thought he'd just kill it there, and I prayed bring Lotus like replication to sharepoint. I was not a huge notes fan early on as the UI was off-putting (I didn't know the UI was written to be cross platform - now it makes sense). But the functionality it provided and the millions of notes DBs written, is truly amazing and it has a huge place of respect in my book. Ray is tops in my book.

[JoshTriplett]

The best description of Lotus Notes I ever heard was "It's like using Microsoft Access with VBA as your email client and calendar". (Plus random forms and "applications" that should have been on the web instead.)

[acomjean]

I built notes database applications a while back in may career. It’s kinda a no sql data store with clunky front end (cross platform as mentioned elsewhere) and lotus script.

After working in it for a while I’d start to notice the Notes email and calendar are just specialized notes applications. It’s not the best..

[pavlov]

Notes preceded the web by many years.

[ochrist]

At some point in time there was something called Domino (or more precisely Lotus Domino Server).

Basically it was a server for Lotus Notes solutions. You could flick a switch, and then you turned your Notes-based solutions into web-applications.

It seems it still exists in some form: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/hcl_domino_12_debuts/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino

[ngcc_hk]

You were retrofit your idea back to one of the integrated idea sharing platform, with security, ease of programming (by user and not IT guys like us) … I still do not see any close to it thing even today.

[beachy]

I feel Notes was a lot like 123. Immensely flexible and you could build anything in it. But the end results were a hairball that you'd never want dropped in your lap to maintain.

[kcplate]

I hated notes but loved 123, I was even one of those weird slash key users of excel after we did the big MS switch for a whole lot longer than I should have been.