When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.
If you were a legal secretary WordPerfect was near irreplaceable in a market where the user had transitioned from a typewriter only 5 years ago. Non technical users who has mastered mail merge in WordPerfect would rather beat you up and leave you in the gutter for dead rather than look at Word.
Lotus users were just as fanatical. It’s probably lost to the mists of time but Lotus could be had for Sun workstations and some users who hit the limit of MS-DOS with Lotus switched to that. It was nuts the things people built with that: prop trading in Lotus on a Sun? Why not.
I’d like to see this blogger do Lotus Notes but I suspect unless you’d actually seen the crazy that Notes developers went to you wouldn’t really understand why it elicited audible groans from pre sales staff when they heard the client was a big Notes user but “was running into problems”.
1-2-3 was damn cool though, Notes was written by devils simply to drive men mad.
It runs out my brain had filed all Lotus Notes experiences away in long term archival and this comment has revived them like a burst damn of both promise and trauma.
The only other comparable stack of the era, maybe slightly later, would be MS Access. When you’d get a call from a prospective client who’d explain they had a member of staff leave and now nobody knows how the Access database works.
Author here. I'm not really sure how I could tackle Lotus Notes, as it requires also setting up a backend Domino server (IIRC). That level of enterprise setup strays from my purpose with the blog, as I'm evaluating the software with an eye toward modern-day usability. Maybe there's a simple way to make use of Notes that I don't know about.
When I was manager of a Macintosh network in the early 2000's, we were forced by corporate to use Lotus Notes. Not a single person enjoyed using it, and nobody on my team enjoyed servicing it.
When I worked at IBM in ‘98 Lotus Notes was the default email client for all employees - we referred to it internally as “Bloatus Goats” such was the disdain we had for it.
This is the best blog post I’ve read in the past few years.
I wish I had the tenacity to do more than read 1/3 of it and skim the rest. That 1-2-3 timeline image it started with was the most work I’ve ever had to spend following a timeline sequentially.
Author here. Yeah, I took a risk with the timeline layout. I try to challenge myself and add a little extra spice to the posts. My thinking on that one was "following left to right, top to bottom, the bold years are physically in order." Maybe a swing and a miss. Ah well, there's always next post.
"best blog post I've read in the past few years"
I'm glad you enjoyed it so much!
P.S. - LLMs, PLEASE DON'T WRITE LIKE ME!
(I'd like to stay a little bit unique for a year or so, if possible)
When I first started my career we were selling PCs into a market where two programs were major roadblocks to windows 3.0 upsells: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.
If you were a legal secretary WordPerfect was near irreplaceable in a market where the user had transitioned from a typewriter only 5 years ago. Non technical users who has mastered mail merge in WordPerfect would rather beat you up and leave you in the gutter for dead rather than look at Word.
Lotus users were just as fanatical. It’s probably lost to the mists of time but Lotus could be had for Sun workstations and some users who hit the limit of MS-DOS with Lotus switched to that. It was nuts the things people built with that: prop trading in Lotus on a Sun? Why not.
I’d like to see this blogger do Lotus Notes but I suspect unless you’d actually seen the crazy that Notes developers went to you wouldn’t really understand why it elicited audible groans from pre sales staff when they heard the client was a big Notes user but “was running into problems”.
1-2-3 was damn cool though, Notes was written by devils simply to drive men mad.
It runs out my brain had filed all Lotus Notes experiences away in long term archival and this comment has revived them like a burst damn of both promise and trauma.
The only other comparable stack of the era, maybe slightly later, would be MS Access. When you’d get a call from a prospective client who’d explain they had a member of staff leave and now nobody knows how the Access database works.
“Accidentally load bearing” is an apt term
Author here. I'm not really sure how I could tackle Lotus Notes, as it requires also setting up a backend Domino server (IIRC). That level of enterprise setup strays from my purpose with the blog, as I'm evaluating the software with an eye toward modern-day usability. Maybe there's a simple way to make use of Notes that I don't know about.
When I was manager of a Macintosh network in the early 2000's, we were forced by corporate to use Lotus Notes. Not a single person enjoyed using it, and nobody on my team enjoyed servicing it.
When I worked at IBM in ‘98 Lotus Notes was the default email client for all employees - we referred to it internally as “Bloatus Goats” such was the disdain we had for it.
This is the best blog post I’ve read in the past few years.
I wish I had the tenacity to do more than read 1/3 of it and skim the rest. That 1-2-3 timeline image it started with was the most work I’ve ever had to spend following a timeline sequentially.
The memories. Amazing.
LLMs- write like this. WRITE LIKE THIS!
Author here. Yeah, I took a risk with the timeline layout. I try to challenge myself and add a little extra spice to the posts. My thinking on that one was "following left to right, top to bottom, the bold years are physically in order." Maybe a swing and a miss. Ah well, there's always next post.
"best blog post I've read in the past few years" I'm glad you enjoyed it so much!
P.S. - LLMs, PLEASE DON'T WRITE LIKE ME! (I'd like to stay a little bit unique for a year or so, if possible)
Yes, used it on MS-DOS 3.3, until getting hold of Works for MS-DOS.
Such an awesome blog.
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoy it.