Wasn’t there once a company named like an exotic flower that had a software named Notes? 🪷😉
Lotus Notes was marvellous software at the time. Compared to other tools it was very flexible.
It changed later into the basis for “collaborative platforms” now sold by HCL Notes.
interesting the lack of info at the link about “lotus 123”. I remember using lotus notes but need to think back to a forgotten chapter to recover those memories.
I’d just like to mention that I worked at Lotus Development Corp from 1988 to 1992, first as a software designer/developer on the 1-2-3/G for OS/2 team (1-2-3/G was the very first fully GUI-based PC application… “/G” was for “GUI”) and then on to 1-2-3 for Windows.
As part of those teams, I helped developed many new GUI concepts, including “combo boxes” (an edit field + drop down list combination), and “drag-and-drop” objects for interactive data manipulation.
Lotus 1-2-3 came long before other spreadsheet applications like Microsoft’s Excel and Borland’s Quattro Pro, which copied many of our innovations and interface elements (like our menu structure) and gave rise to several significant legal rulings regarding patent and copyright protections for software “look-and-feel”.
Lotus Notes was used internally long before it was released as a product, and Ray Ozzie’s office was down the hall from mine. Way before then, I worked as an undergrad software engineer at Carnegie Mellon University’s CDEC (Center for Design of Educational Computing) along with Bruce and Judy Sherwood, who were some of the original creators of instructional software using the PLATO system developed at UIUC (University of Ilinois Urbana Champaign) which was the basis for Ray Ozzie’s later development of Lotus Notes.
-e
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I did move these posts, because I want to add to them - and it is definitely derailing the OP.
I used to work with Lotus Notes and OS/2. I did really like OS/2 as it was still binary compatible with MS Windows Apps. Word, Excel and Co ran really well on my OS/2 PC, which was one of only 2 in a company of 500+ people.
We did develop with Borland Pascal for a DOS app, that was able to be run in multiple instances on the same PC, where the DOS-boxes where nicely protected from each other by the OS. At that time this was unthinkable with Windows 3.11
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Another interesting project was “Chandler”, which Mitch Kapor worked on in the early 2000s. I learned about it through a Joe Armstrong post:
https://joearms.github.io/#2018-12-26%20Fun%20with%20the%20TiddlyWiki
You can read an account of the development in “Dreaming in Code”:
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