Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch
This article explores the history of Lotus Notes, highlighting its innovative features in the late 1980s that predated modern email and collaboration tools. It reflects on the challenges of software development and the evolution of digital communication platforms.
Why it matters
Understanding the history of software like Lotus Notes provides context for current collaboration tool design and the recurring cycles of technological innovation.
Lotus Notes, in 1989, had encryption two years before Pretty Good Privacy brought it to normal email, had rich text formatting and attachments before MIME, had read receipts, notifications, a directory of users, and wiki-style cross-message links. It, rightly, felt like the future.
Or like déjà vu, if you’d used email on a timesharing computer at your university.
Lotus Notes was the future of communications, a decade before laptops had WiFi. Yet of all things, it wasn’t even an email app. It was a notes app, a collaboration tool, an all-things-to-all-people software that let you build apps in the way Access and Airtable later would. That, and the notes could be used for email.
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