I was a Lotus Notes developer for more than 10 years. The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing. I started with Notes 4.5, IIRC, and ended my time around Notes 8.

The first few years were a little heavy on RAM usage, so people thought it was slow. To give you some context, this was back when 16 MB (megabytes, not gigabytes) of RAM was a thing. But as RAM increased, Notes was no longer a problem.

For example, Lotus Notes 8, which I still have on my personal PC, uses about 11 MB just after starting. Then it adds roughly 10 MB for each "app" you open. Today, Outlook alone uses around 170 MB just after starting.

It was incredibly powerful. And migrating a Domino server was incredibly easy. Basically, you just copied the DATA folder. I remember doing this when we migrated from Windows 2000/2003 to AIX.

In the same way, the Notes client was basically a portable app. You could just copy the NOTES and DATA folder, edit notes.ini, and have it running.

So sad to see it go.

> The speed at which you could develop useful software was mind-blowing.

It is. And it's the main thing why my boss does not understand why rebuilding databases takes so much time. For him its just a little thing, some fields and off you go...

Unfortunately it is possible for databases to be copied, mixed and matched and deployed somewhere else resulting i a pile of duplicated databases without structure.