I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?

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maguay 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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).

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ubermonkey 4 hours ago | parent [-]

SMTP predates Notes by nearly a decade.

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p_l 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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austin-cheney 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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maguay 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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jklowden 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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roryirvine 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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p_l 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	roryirvine 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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bluGill 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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stonogo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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busywaiting 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Usually, when someone talks about "starting from scratch" they mean "starting over from scratch," meaning throwing out something good enough in the hope of building something perfect.

This article is more about "first mover disadvantage" or "handicap of a head start" where an early implementation is leapfrogged by competitors that don't have legacy baggage.

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rsynnott 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think they basically did (at one point, horrifyingly, there was a lotus notes based on Eclipse of all things), but yeah, article doesn’t mention it as far as I can see. Maybe they hit publish too early…

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m_mueller 5 hours ago | parent [-]

the Eclipse version still had the old DLLs underneath with just a rather superficial Java layer put on top. JVM wrapping compiled C code, yay....

	▲	cube00 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Always fun when NLNOTES crashed but the Eclipse wrapper kept running so things like tabs still worked but couldn't show any Notes tabs however web based tabs kept working.

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nchmy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had the same reaction. I was particularly interested in "the dangers of starting from scratch" and it just turned out to be a history of lotus notes. I stopped reading about 80% of the way through, so perhaps they addressed that towards the end - but the title should have been different then.

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jmclnx 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something?

In a way yes, IBM wanted notes to be an email clone. IBM took cc mail (I think) and shoehorned it into Lotus notes.

To me, that ruined Notes. If I get the versions numbers right, version 3 was great, IBM/Lotus came out with v4, which to me was a bit worse, and each new version was worse than the prior. Instead of focusing on emails, IBM should have focused on making notes servers easy to install and maintain and keep the application portion relevant.

By worse, it was the application portion that degraded. If you saw how cool the applications were with v3, you would wonder why Notes never became a "thing". Even third parties were creating applications for Notes at the time, some were very good. But to me IBM ruined that business by focusing on only Email part of Notes. Now AFAIK, there are no 3rd party applications for notes.

Maybe the company that bought notes from IBM is trying to get back to the roots, but I kind of doubt it.

	▲	nradov an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The IBM Lotus Notes mail client and cc:Mail were developed independently by separate teams in different locations. Both were originally built by independent companies that were later acquired. cc:Mail was killed in 2000. IBM might have added some Notes features to achieve functional parity with cc:Mail and make it easier for customers to migrate.