I worked for Lotus in the 90s as a systems engineer for a port of Lotus 123 for IBM mainframes.
My territory was mainly scandanavian countries, due to a go getter salesman in that region, so I got to see that part of the world on expenses and do really interesting tech. What a time.
From memory MVS/XA - but it was so long ago I wouldn't bet on it. I do remember it was a great offering, though soon overshadowed by the new hotness that was Lotus Notes.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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..
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.
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.
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.
Company I worked for switched from Lotus Notes to Office365 7-8 years ago. The email client was decent but weird, which was a lot better than Microsofts. And the chat client actually worked, unlike Lync for business (chat on multiple devices was completely broken).
Main reason for switching was that it was going to pay for itself, as Notes was expensive. But we also had hundreds of applications in Notes with no replacement plan or budget to do so, so they barely got rid of any licenses.
My territory was mainly scandanavian countries, due to a go getter salesman in that region, so I got to see that part of the world on expenses and do really interesting tech. What a time.