So... PLATO user, Notes user and Thunderbird user here with a
couple of notes.
a. Everything you think is new was created in the 1960s by Don
Bitzer @ UIUC or Doug Engelbart @ SRI. (and probably also
Robert Creasy @ IBM.)
b. Lotus Notes (and Groove) were products, not protocols. If
you wanted to use them, you used Windows and the server and
client from the vendor.
c. Lotus Notes only sort of worked over the intarwebs. It had
serious problems traversing firewalls, and technically worked
over VPNs, but was nearly unusable as it required you to
either replicate your AD server or use AD over the VPN (I do
not recommend the latter option.)
d. Like JIRA, in order to do anything interesting with Lotus
Notes, you effectively had to have admin privileges. This
isn't strictly true, but it's effectively true. Both JIRA
and Lotus Notes were designed for organizations whose thinky
bits were managed centrally. Have a site or department
specific process? Better schedule time with your admin to
talk about how they're going to model your work-flow because
there's no way you're going to be able to build it yourself.
Groove was a little better, but it was disturbingly easy for
the brittle XML based DTDs used to model data to become out
of sync between users. Guess it's time to restore from
backup.
e. As much as I loved PLATO, it was a centralized / mainframe
type system. Of course it was easy to coordinate via a notes
file, it was a single file on a centrally shared,
non-replicated volume that (usually) had very loose write
permissions.
The reason notes (or it's bastard offspring Lotus Notes)
didn't take over the world was it put all the thinky bits in
one place, probably locked down by a BOFH. There's little we
learned from the micro-computer revolution from the 70s and
80s, but what we did seem to get is we all hated being
dependent on that one guy from accounting to write a few
COBOL programs for us so we could see what our sales figures
looked like this month.
It seems weird we're comparing PLATO NOTES with Lotus Notes
email. PNOTES (Personal Notes) was the equivalent of email.
NOTES was more the equivalent of Usenet News.
And Notes was an application environment w/ data replication
that had a shim layer on top of it that looked like an email
system. It was more like Hypercard with git-ish semantics.
(Which now that I think about it, wouldn't be that bad of a
product.)
But... after more than 50 years in tech, I still use Thunderbird
as my email client. If I could figure out a way to get it to
turn off HTML mail I would. I'm on the vanguard of the orange
catholic butlerian jihad. Not only do I seek a prohibition of
thinking machines, I'm also quite suspcious of richly formatted
text.
Maybe the reason (Lotus) Notes failed was that people kept
thinking of it as an email client. Raymond Lowey talked about
the "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" principle. Meaning you can
push product design only so far before people no longer
understand how they're expected to integrate it into their
lives. Lotus Notes was the poster child for this concept.
