Notes is 20 years old

What a mile stone, 20 years old and still growing, changing and meeting the needs of customers.

As some of you may know I started using Notes version 1 at the end of 1990, about 1 year after it was launched, in those days there was always some new software being launched, which you had to try.  Very often IT professionals were given a copy of the latest software.

So many good software products have disappeared over this time period, products like Wordstar, Word Perfect, Dbase, Lotus 123 and just so many others.

Its a testament to Notes that not only is it still with us, but its here and growing, I hear that IBM will be telling the world, very soon, that there are now over 150 million users and that the growth rate is increasing.

Everytime when Lotus releases a new version there is a significant step forward in what Notes can do and how useful it is to business.  When 8.5 was released it had DAOS, which allowed attachments to be removed automatically from the mail file and stored separately.  I have heard of a mail file going down from 79 Mb to just 10 Mb, that is a pretty amazing reduction in file size.

With Notes 8.5.1 we got the new Domino designer, which is now free for anyone, this is a full Eclipse designer and allows the Notes developer to create far more creative and powerful applications, especially web based apps, using xPages.

What really annoys me is the childish attacks that MS makes on Notes whilst there product hardly moves forward at all, if you compare what Lotus has released by way of new functionality over the last 10 years against what is new in Exchange its an order of magnitude different.

Anyway congratulations to IBM and the lotus team on this massive event and I look forward to the next 20 years of innovative and cleaver Notes development.

Above is the UI for Notes 1 that I still remember using, in those days it was very different Windows had not yet arrived and yet it had Windows, in DOS.