I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.]
Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.
And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!
In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.
Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.
The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
Lotus Notes as a thick client application was a dead end but the Domino server could have lived on as a back end database for web applications, if IBM had any vision. The core technology of a fast, secure NoSQL document database with multi-master replication actually worked really well (at least after they fixed the index corruption race condition bug that I found). But it had a weird stupid limit of (I think) 64GB per file with no automatic sharding support. And they never added XML or JSON as native data types. So it gradually became useless. What a shame.
Look at the history of Lotus Notes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes#History )Development began in 1984. 64MB was large back then, maybe 64GB total was seen, but multiples of 64GB?
I guess Lotus/IBM decided to stop upgrading Lotus Notes as computer limits were increased.
Obligatory Damien Katz Lotus Notes Formula Engine Rewrite (it is a great story but also shows the limits the original devs had to deal with; n.b. scroll down to read Ray Ozzie's comment): see https://web.archive.org/web/20050110035626/http://damienkatz...
I don't remember the details but IBM did increase the Domino file size limit a couple of times. The original limit was even smaller than 64GB. Eventually they gave up and stopped investing in the platform so after a few years it fell hopelessly behind advancements in storage hardware technology.
I'm curious about this part: "The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too."
IIRC LotusScript was basically VB but with a different object model. Why was it a dead end?
Back then a lot of software particularly in the windows world wasn’t very good at talking to anything else. Today everything talks to everything.
Notes already had so many problems it was sunk and lotuscript which as you say was like script. Good but not enough to stop the titanic hitting the iceberg.
It wasn't that hard to get data out. IBM released a native Windows ODBC driver for Domino databases. Since the underlying database was non-relational you couldn't really use it for SQL queries with complex joins but for basic data export tasks it worked fine.
Java became available as an alternative to Lotuscript on the backend, I believe in version 5, and Javascript was made available on the frontend around that time. Although maybe I'm thinking of the web version of the frontend.
Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.
Cut my teeth in Lotus Notes development. The combination of forms, views, and agents with the Notes security model was really powerful. I look at products like Notion and Coda and see nothing but Notes forms and views and formulas everywhere. Ray Ozzie was way ahead of his time.
I am still convinced, that one way to foster professionalism in working e-mail and to facilitate collaboration would be to use e-mail as the interface for a content management system:
- incoming e-mails are categorized by organization sending/topic (until a project can be associated)
- all attachments are stripped off and stored on the server using a hierarchy which the recipient is prompted to update
- outgoing e-mails are treated in the same fashion in reverse, so a link to a file on a server is moved to the CMS and then included as a clickable link
(probably employees would have to have a separate company-sponsored e-mail for insurance correspondence)
One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time.
Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
Notes isn't exactly dead. A couple of years ago I helped a swedish county extract social services data from a system built on it, which is still in use by quite a few other counties.
Among other things I wrote a batch converter from the XML based export format to PDF files packaged according to a standard for digital archives, and we brought on a specialised consultant to help us out inventing an export for system logs.
I expect there to be many products still out there that are actually built on but not advertised as LotusNotes, waiting for someone like me to come along and figure out how to decommission them. As a RAD platform Notes/Domino is apparently highly productive for those that still know how to do it.
Ahm, it didn't. I mean, yes it is actively dying but not quite there yet. In fact, where I work we still make good revenue offering consulting and even products for LND. I think this part at the end of the article sums it up well:
> Lotus Notes is now HCL Notes, and as far as I can tell HCL intends to just enjoy the revenue as long as legacy customers will pay them to keep Notes running.
Yes, there are, and I dare say, a lot of legacy customers still paying for LND. So it is dying, but not as fast as people tend to think.
> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.
Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".
But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there can be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.
Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that can be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.
Windows had barely landed. Networking was really only used for file serving in most corporations. There was no email at most companies and TCP/IP was still mostly a university and government thing.
Notes turned up as a deeply sophisticated Windows application, a no-code development environment, document oriented, replicated distributed shared data system with built in security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.
The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.
Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.
At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
In my experience working with Notes over many years, it was a neat architecture let down by client UI that did not meet the expectations of users who also used, for example, MS Office apps. Often, they were cosmetic things. But Notes enabled workflow applications like email on steroids; Microsoft leveraged all it could to displace Notes with Exchange and SharePoint, both IMO technically not as good as Notes in many areas, but the Outlook UI was much better than the Notes client for email, and together with the marketing push, client-side Notes was finished. Domino could perhaps have survived, but it needed more than the anaemic LotusScript and formula language to get support from developers, and that never happened.
I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT.
Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all.
Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
I ended up at IBM around the turn of the century. They bought Lotus and I was brought on to write lotus notes applications.
The article asks “what is notes”. For applications it’s a nosql database with a gui front end. You can make custom applications and share with your team easily. Lotusscript bound it together.
We ported a green screen tracking software (year 2000 was approaching) to Notes and had a bunch of custom Notes applications the department used regularly.
It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.
The email client was just another notes database. I later worked somewhere that had Notes and only used the email.
> Admittedly, IBM buying a popular software product at great expense and running it into the ground is an old story.
IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.
The PLATO connection is the best part of this piece.
PLATO ran its own programming language - TUTOR - which was designed specifically for creating interactive lessons on the system in 1967.
It's one of the earliest examples of a domain-specific language shaped entirely by its platform. The system also had real-time chat, message boards, and multiplayer games running on shared terminals in the early 1970s — a decade before BBSs went mainstream.
Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.
I worked on IBM GS's dedicated Linux team. Notes didn't have a native client, so someone made a secret IBM internal tool call fetchnotes - a small binary that converted Lotus X400 email into POP3 or IMAP4 (not sure which), calendar appointments into icals, and contcts into vcard.
It got so popular - you could do your work using Thunderbird instead of Notes - that Windows users wanted to run Linux VMs to run Fetchnotes and not have to use Notes.
I had a not great experience with Notes. It was slow and cumbersome. I had become used to Outlook for e-mail, plain simple e-mail. It was fast, light and didn't treat everything as a note. Notes is this heavy app that was slow to load anything with an early 90's aesthetic.
I worked for a large financial (~80,000 employees) that decided to move to Notes from in-house exchange servers well after it was obvious Microsoft had won the productivity wars. Rumor mill suggested it was brought in at the direction of a board member who just so happened to have close interests with IBM.
It set overall productivity back by at least 5 years before executives were forced to make a very decisive and quick move to O365. The reason given were scalability issues, the overwhelming cost of purchasing P-Series hardware (6-digits for one server) by the rack to keep up with demand along with the cost of developers attempting to make something useful for all of the different business needs.
Last I checked they are still stuck with some small, but essential work being diverted through Notes despite the move back to Microsoft.
Lotus/IBM took an extremely flexible, encrypted, document-oriented database with a powerful RAD client platform and tried to sell it as a competitor to Outlook-Exchange. And Outlook-Exchange won, because as terrible as it was (and it was much worse then than it is now) it still had a better user experience than Notes Mail.
Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.
Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.
I have such mixed memories regarding Lotus Notes... prior to working with software dev, I'd worked a few contract stints in data entry/lookup because I could type and 10-key very fast. Later I'd work a few different developer contract roles at the same large banking company.
One such contract was to exfiltrate a Notes based application and it's data in to a new application. Apparently integration was the real issue at hand and I can understand why after just dipping my toes into Notes. I can see how easy Notes is to create things, It was nicer than MS Access IMO. But trying to reverse engineer from said apps was painful to say the least. It turns out that the app in question ws so broadly hated, that 3 different groups had already been doing the exact same thing, with 2 others looking into it. They decided to look at the different teams in place and pick one to move forward. It wasn't the team I was on that was kept and so ends my experience with Lotus/IBM Notes.
As a pure employee a few years earlier, Notes was pretty nifty, it was used to integrate just about everything in the company. Definitely gives insight into where a lot of Dilbert jokes came from, definitely from Notes. Though allowing JavaScript in HTML email with early Outlook was a really bad design decision as well.
My first dev job was a Notes developer. It really was an amazing piece of tech in hindsight. IMO their real folly was chasing the web trend; at its heart it was a groupware product, and they tried to make it be too many things to everybody. I spent most of my time trying to wrestle it into doing things it wasn't meant to do. It got me extremely proficient with LotusScript which led to other opportunities (Hello ASP!) but the whole thing is a shame. Had they stayed in their lane with the product, it might still be alive and widely used today.
I joined a company in 2025 an since then I am tasked with porting all Lotus Notes databases to the web (spa+restapi). Funny to see all the comments living in the past as its so present to me.
I worked at a Lotus shop in the 90s. It was great until everyone moved to the web, and then it got too clunky. Fat clients that stored tons of data locally weren’t the thing anymore.
When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.
When the Mac version came out, I was all over it. WordPerfect user at the time, but wird processing was king back then. It would freeze and crash and irritate me. But I loved using it. If anything, it made things interesting for us Mac users as our options to PC software were quite virtually nonexistent.
109 comments
Lotus Notes was, I firmly believe, a glimpse of the future to come. In 1996, Lotus Notes had encrypted messaging, shared calendars, rich-text editing, and a sophisticated app development environment. I had my entire work environment (email, calendar, bugs database, etc.) fully replicated on my computer. I could do everything offline and later, replicate with the server.
And this was two years before the launch of Google and eight years before GMail!
In the article, the author speculates that the simplicity of the Lotus Notes model--everything is a note--caused it to become too complicated and too brittle. I don't think that's true.
Lotus Notes died because the web took over, and the web took over because it was even simpler. Lotus Notes was a thick client and a sophisticated server. The web is just a protocol. Even before AI, I could write a web server in a weekend. A browser is harder, but browsers are free and ubiquitous.
The web won because it could evolve faster than Lotus Notes could. And because it was free. The web won because it was open.
I guess Lotus/IBM decided to stop upgrading Lotus Notes as computer limits were increased.
Obligatory Damien Katz Lotus Notes Formula Engine Rewrite (it is a great story but also shows the limits the original devs had to deal with; n.b. scroll down to read Ray Ozzie's comment): see https://web.archive.org/web/20050110035626/http://damienkatz...
So having a limit of 64GB per file doesn't sound so bad.
It was very hard to get data in and out it had almost no capability for data import/export.
Internet email killed Notes early advantage as one of the first email systems.
It was a very closed environment hard to connect or program outside its own sandbox.
Sharepoint was a full on assault by Microsoft on the groupware category and its enormous success was at the expense of Notes.
The web did many things better than notes there much much overlap.
The UI was clunky in some ways.
Some of the concepts like replication were just too much too early for many people to grasp.
SQL rose in the corporate world chipping away further at notes.
The Notes formula language was good ish for the time but really became very dated, and the alternative LotusScript was a dead end too.
Unstructured document databases were very polarizing sine people hated them with a passion.
The parent company Lotus main product 1-2-3 which ad dominated the spreadsheet world got smashed by Excel.
There’s more reasons too but there’s enough there you can see the doom of Notes.
IIRC LotusScript was basically VB but with a different object model. Why was it a dead end?
Back then a lot of software particularly in the windows world wasn’t very good at talking to anything else. Today everything talks to everything.
Notes already had so many problems it was sunk and lotuscript which as you say was like script. Good but not enough to stop the titanic hitting the iceberg.
> Lotus Notes died because the web took over
Lotus Notes died because it was proprietary. Had it been open: an open server and open protocol, I believe every device would be using it today.
I had one good dose of that platform for four years. It was a biotech with ~100 people in five countries[1], and four states in the US. There were Notes servers all over the place, and it worked with skeletal admin resources on neglected, low cost Dell boxes. It worked for management, sales and the labs.
[1] US, Germany, France, Japan and Canada, in that order.
- incoming e-mails are categorized by organization sending/topic (until a project can be associated)
- all attachments are stripped off and stored on the server using a hierarchy which the recipient is prompted to update
- outgoing e-mails are treated in the same fashion in reverse, so a link to a file on a server is moved to the CMS and then included as a clickable link
(probably employees would have to have a separate company-sponsored e-mail for insurance correspondence)
Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
Among other things I wrote a batch converter from the XML based export format to PDF files packaged according to a standard for digital archives, and we brought on a specialised consultant to help us out inventing an export for system logs.
I expect there to be many products still out there that are actually built on but not advertised as LotusNotes, waiting for someone like me to come along and figure out how to decommission them. As a RAD platform Notes/Domino is apparently highly productive for those that still know how to do it.
> Lotus Notes died
Ahm, it didn't. I mean, yes it is actively dying but not quite there yet. In fact, where I work we still make good revenue offering consulting and even products for LND. I think this part at the end of the article sums it up well:
> Lotus Notes is now HCL Notes, and as far as I can tell HCL intends to just enjoy the revenue as long as legacy customers will pay them to keep Notes running.
Yes, there are, and I dare say, a lot of legacy customers still paying for LND. So it is dying, but not as fast as people tend to think.
edit: typos
I’ve seen Notes 3 clients and servers on the usual abandonware sites, but never any pre-3.x version
> It is hard, today, to explain exactly what Lotus Notes was.
Whenever I try to explain what it does to a non-tech person, I'm met with confused looks that make me quickly give up and mumble something like "It's for techies and data nerds". I think to myself "they're not my target audience".
But I actually would like them to be, at some point. In the 90s "the generality and depth of its capabilities meant that it was also just plain hard to use", but now LLMs lower a lot the barrier to entry, so I think there can be a renaissance of such malleable¹ platforms.
Of course, the user still needs to "know what they need" and see software as something that can be configured and shaped to their needs which, with "digital literacy" decreasing, might be a bigger obstacle than I think.
¹ https://www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-software
Windows had barely landed. Networking was really only used for file serving in most corporations. There was no email at most companies and TCP/IP was still mostly a university and government thing.
Notes turned up as a deeply sophisticated Windows application, a no-code development environment, document oriented, replicated distributed shared data system with built in security encryption, email and all deeply integrated with the concepts of people and groups of people, which everyone takes for granted now, but back then wasn’t part of corporate computing at all.
The email alone led the rise of Lotus Notes, let alone the rest of the system.
Using Notes you could suddenly create applications that shared data across your office locations - you ran a server locally and Notes dialed up the other servers and did replication of just the changed/different data. It was gob smacking because nothing else could do this.
At a time when personal computing was very much the model, it was like someone had sent this software from the future.
San Francisco's school board still uses it: https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/Public
(Note the .nsf extension, which signifies a Notes database)
Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all.
Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
The article asks “what is notes”. For applications it’s a nosql database with a gui front end. You can make custom applications and share with your team easily. Lotusscript bound it together.
We ported a green screen tracking software (year 2000 was approaching) to Notes and had a bunch of custom Notes applications the department used regularly.
It was clunky but also kind or remarkable that a very small team could develop custom apps.
The email client was just another notes database. I later worked somewhere that had Notes and only used the email.
> Admittedly, IBM buying a popular software product at great expense and running it into the ground is an old story.
IBM (Rational (Pure (Atria))) ClearCase and IBM (Rational (Telelogic)) Synergy are two other casualties why I once showed a slide of the elephant cemetary from the Lion King in a Powerpoint presentation arguing why the company should switch to git.
PLATO ran its own programming language - TUTOR - which was designed specifically for creating interactive lessons on the system in 1967.
It's one of the earliest examples of a domain-specific language shaped entirely by its platform. The system also had real-time chat, message boards, and multiplayer games running on shared terminals in the early 1970s — a decade before BBSs went mainstream.
Lotus Notes, email, Slack — the entire groupware lineage traces back to a university teaching system in Illinois.
fetchnotes- a small binary that converted Lotus X400 email into POP3 or IMAP4 (not sure which), calendar appointments into icals, and contcts into vcard.It got so popular - you could do your work using Thunderbird instead of Notes - that Windows users wanted to run Linux VMs to run Fetchnotes and not have to use Notes.
I worked for a large financial (~80,000 employees) that decided to move to Notes from in-house exchange servers well after it was obvious Microsoft had won the productivity wars. Rumor mill suggested it was brought in at the direction of a board member who just so happened to have close interests with IBM.
It set overall productivity back by at least 5 years before executives were forced to make a very decisive and quick move to O365. The reason given were scalability issues, the overwhelming cost of purchasing P-Series hardware (6-digits for one server) by the rack to keep up with demand along with the cost of developers attempting to make something useful for all of the different business needs.
Last I checked they are still stuck with some small, but essential work being diverted through Notes despite the move back to Microsoft.
Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.
Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.
One such contract was to exfiltrate a Notes based application and it's data in to a new application. Apparently integration was the real issue at hand and I can understand why after just dipping my toes into Notes. I can see how easy Notes is to create things, It was nicer than MS Access IMO. But trying to reverse engineer from said apps was painful to say the least. It turns out that the app in question ws so broadly hated, that 3 different groups had already been doing the exact same thing, with 2 others looking into it. They decided to look at the different teams in place and pick one to move forward. It wasn't the team I was on that was kept and so ends my experience with Lotus/IBM Notes.
As a pure employee a few years earlier, Notes was pretty nifty, it was used to integrate just about everything in the company. Definitely gives insight into where a lot of Dilbert jokes came from, definitely from Notes. Though allowing JavaScript in HTML email with early Outlook was a really bad design decision as well.
When that company moved off of Notes despite the massive investment, the writing was on the wall even if the product survived for a few decades under IBM.