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This article was taken from the Notes site at http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/today.nsf/lookup/ndhistory
As you might expect of such complex and successful
software, Lotus Notes and Domino share a long and rich history. In some
respects, this history mirrors the evolution of the computing industry itself—the
development and widespread adoption of PCs, networks, graphical user
interfaces, communication and collaboration software, the Web. Notes and Domino
have been there nearly every step of the way, influencing (and being influenced
by) all these critical developments.
This article briefly retraces the history of Notes and
Domino, starting with the earliest conceptual and development stages, and
continuing through major feature releases. Along the way it examines:
Finally, we'll take a quick look at Notes 6 and Domino 6,
the upcoming new version, and talk a little about what the future holds for
these storied products.
The early days: The birth of an idea
You may find this a little surprising, but the original concept that
eventually led to the Notes client and Domino server actually predates the
commercial development of the personal computer by nearly a decade. Notes and
Domino find their roots in some of the first computer programs written at the
Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL), at the
In 1976, PLATO Group Notes was released. Group Notes took
the original concept of PLATO Notes and expanded on it by allowing users to:
PLATO Group Notes became popular and remained so into the
1980s. However, after the introduction the IBM PC and MS-DOS by Microsoft in
1982, the mainframe-based architecture of PLATO became less cost-effective.
Group Notes began to metamorphose into many other "notes type" software products.
Ray Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen, and Len
Kawell worked on the PLATO system at CERL in the late
1970s. All were impressed with its real-time communication. Halvorsen
and Kawell later took what they learned at CERL and
created a PLATO Notes-like product at Digital Equipment Corporation.
At the same time, Ray Ozzie worked independently on a
proposal for developing a PC-based Notes product. At first, he was unable to
obtain funding for his idea. However, Mitch Kapor,
founder of Lotus Development Corporation, saw potential in Ozzie's work, and
decided to invest Lotus's money for its development. Kapor's
business acumen, creativity, and foresight were critical in changing Ozzie's
vision into reality.
Development
on Notes begins
Near the end of 1984, Ozzie founded Iris
Associates Inc., under contract and funded by Lotus, in order to develop the
first release of Lotus Notes. In January 1985, shortly after Iris Associates
began, Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell
joined Ozzie, followed soon after by Steven Beckhardt.
All brought extensive knowledge and vision to the company, as well as
career-long interests in collaboration and messaging software, at a time when
such concepts were considered novel at best and impractical at worst. They
modeled Lotus Notes after PLATO Notes but expanded it to include many more
powerful features. Alan Eldridge, from Digital Equipment Corporation, soon
joined Iris Associates, contributing to the database and security features of
the Notes architecture.
The original vision of
Notes included online discussion, e-mail, phone books, and document databases.
However, the state of the technology at the time presented two serious
challenges. First, networking was rudimentary and slow compared to today.
Therefore, the developers originally decided to position Notes as a personal
information manager (PIM), like Organizer, with some sharing capability.
Second, PC operating systems were immature, so Iris had to write a lot of
system-level code to develop things such as the Name Server and databases.
Eventually, as networking became more capable, Iris began to speak of Notes as
"groupware." The term groupware (which eventually grew
virtually synonymous with Notes itself) refers to applications that enhance
communication, collaboration, and coordination among groups of people.
To meet these goals,
Notes would offer users a client/server architecture that featured PCs
connected to a local area network (LAN). A group could set up a dedicated
server machine (a PC) that communicated with other groups' server machines
(either on the same LAN or through switched networks). Servers exchanged
information through "replicated data;" that is, there were
potentially many copies of the same database resident on different servers, and
the Notes server software continuously synchronized them. This made it just as
easy for users to exchange information with co-workers in a branch office as
with those in their own office.
The vision of the
founders quickly evolved into the idea of creating the first virtual community.
Tom Diaz, former Vice President of Engineering at Iris, says, "It was
eccentric to think about group communication software in 1984, when most people
had never touched an e-mail system...the product was very far ahead of its
time. It was the first commercial client/server product."
Another Notes key
feature was customization. According to Tim Halvorsen,
early on there was debate over the structure of Notes. He says the developers
wondered, "Should we build applications in the product or should we allow
it to be flexible and let users do it because we don't know what they will
want?" They eventually opted for a flexible product that allowed users to
build the applications they needed. Thus Notes architecture would use a
building block approach; you could construct group textual applications by
piecing together the various services that are available. "This was big in
the success of the product," states Halvorsen.
"In no case do we say, no, this is the only way you can do it." Notes has been able to survive the changes in the industry
because it is a flexible product users can customize to fit their changing
needs.
Apple Computer had
recently released the Macintosh, with a
new easy-to-use graphical user interface. This influenced the developers of
Lotus Notes, and they gave their new product a character-oriented graphical
user interface.
Most of the core development
was completed within two years, but the developers spent an additional year
porting the code for the client and the server from the Windows operating
system, to OS/2. During this time the developers at Iris used Notes to
communicate remotely with people at Lotus. Halvorsen
says, "Simply using the product every day helped us develop key
functionality." For example, the developers needed to synchronize data
between the two different locations, so they invented replication. "This
wasn't in the original plan, but the problem arose and we solved it," says
Halvorsen.
The development of
Notes took a long time by today's standards. But according to Steve Beckhardt, this extended development period helped ensure
the success of Notes. This made Notes a very solid product, with no real
competition in the market.
In August 1986, the
product was complete to a point it demonstrated all of its unique capabilities
and had preliminary documentation. It was ready to ship to the first internal
Lotus users. At that time, Lotus
evaluated and accepted the product. Lotus bought the rights to Notes in 1987.
Lotus Notes was
successful even before its first release. The head of Price Waterhouse viewed a
pre-release demo of Notes and was so impressed he bought 10,000 copies. At that
time, it was the largest PC sale ever of a single software product. As the
first large Notes customer, Price Waterhouse predicted that Lotus Notes would
transform the way we do business. As we now know, they were right.
Release
1.0: A star is born
The first release of Notes shipped in
1989. During the first year it was on the market, more than 35,000 copies of
Notes were sold. The Notes client required DOS 3.1 or OS/2. The Notes server
required either DOS 3.1, 4.0, or OS/2.
Release 1.0 provided several "ready to use"
applications such as Group Mail, Group Discussion, and Group Phone Book. Notes
also provided templates that assisted you in the construction of custom
applications. This ability to design customizable applications using Notes led
to a business partner community that designed Notes applications. Today,
thousands of companies build their own software products that run on top of
Notes, but the founders didn't expect Notes to be a "developers'
product." They envisioned a shrink-wrapped PC communications product that
would run right out of the box. In reality it became both.
Release 1.0 offered the following functionality, much of it
revolutionary in 1989:
Release 1.1
The first set of enhancements to Notes became
available in 1990. Release 1.1 was not a feature release, but an internal
restructuring of the code that included new portability layers. The developers
made a large architectural investment in Notes as a multi-platform product.
They wrote a large amount of the product insulating the functional parts of
Notes from the operating system. This means that, although Notes ran on many
platforms, the developers didn't port the code from platform to platform. They
developed the code for different operating systems in parallel. Already, this
investment began to pay off. In this release of Notes, they began to support
additional operating systems, OS/2 1.2 Extended Edition, Novell Netware
Requester for OS/2 1.2, and Novell Netware/386. However, their biggest
achievement and the focus of this release was the added support for Windows 3.0,
which was achieved by working closely with Microsoft as an influential beta
site for Windows 3.0.
Release 2.0: Bigger and better
The next major release of Notes shipped in 1991. For Release 2.0,
scalability became the focus. After Release 1.0 sold to large companies, Iris
realized Notes needed to scale to support 10,000 users. Notes
was initially intended for small to medium sized businesses. The
founders' original vision did not include large companies as users; they only
expected 25 or so people logging in to one server. The reason for this was that
the PCs of the day didn't have a lot of power. As the PCs and their networks
became more powerful, so did Notes.
Throughout the 1990s, as Notes
accommodated more and more users, larger companies bought it. Sales growth was slow but steady, as Lotus sold the product to
high end customers willing to invest time and effort getting large groups of
users up and running. As these early customers used Notes with great success,
the installed user base grew.
Originally, there was a 200-license minimum for Notes;
Lotus did not sell individual copies. As a result, the minimum purchase price
was $62,000. Lotus targeted big companies because they felt that only those
companies would comprehend and exploit the potential of the product. Price
Waterhouse and other early test sites showed that the big companies would get
it.
Tim Halvorsen remembers that as
Notes slowly began to grow, so did the development team. By the second release,
there were approximately 12 developers working on Notes. For the early
releases, Halvorsen says, "We were very
responsive to the needs of our customers, but then we also tried to build it
with the ability to accommodate future changes in the industry."
Release 2.0 included the following enhancements:
Release 3.0: Notes for everyone
Notes Release 3.0 shipped in May 1993. By this time, Iris
had about 25 developers working on Notes. Release 3.0 was build number 114.3c.
This means it was the 114th successful build of Notes ever and that it took
three tries to complete the final build.
At the time of the release, more than 2,000 companies and
nearly 500,000 people used Notes. The goal of Release 3.0 was to build further
on what Notes already was, to make the user interface cooler and more
up-to-date, and to evolve it further as a cross-platform product. Lotus began
to aim the product at a larger market and reduced the price accordingly.
Release 3.0 featured the first of a series of rewrites of the database system,
NIF, to try to make the product scale to even larger user populations. This
release was suitable for about 200 users simultaneously using a server.
Release 3.0 also added greater design capability, and many
additional features, including:
Lotus SmartSuite shipped in 1993 with a Bonus Pack, called
Notes F/X that allowed applications to share data and still integrate the data
in a Notes database using OLE.
In May 1994, Lotus purchased Iris Associates, Inc. This had
very little effect on the product itself, but it did simplify some of the
pricing and packaging issues surrounding Notes. In May 1995, Lotus released InterNotes News, a product that provided a gateway between
the Internet news sources and Notes. This was the first project that reflected
the growing influence of the Internet on Notes.
Release 4.0: A whole new look
In January 1996, Lotus released Notes Release 4.0. This
release offered a completely redesigned user interface based on customer
feedback. This interface exposed and simplified many Notes features, making it
easier to use, program, and administer. When the developers gave a
demonstration of the new user interface at Lotusphere
(a yearly user group meeting), they received a standing ovation from the crowd
of customers.
The product continued to become more scalable. It became
faster and faster as companies added additional processors to a multiprocessor
server. Lotus cut the price of Notes in half, and thus successfully gained a
larger market share.
In addition, Notes began to integrate with the Web, and
many new features reflected the prominence of Web technology in the industry.
Ray Ozzie, the first Notes developer and founder of Iris Associates, saw the
importance of the Web before the Web became the phenomenon it is today. This
was a key element in the success of Notes. A new product called the Server Web
Navigator, allowed the Notes server, connected to the Web, to retrieve pages
off the Web, and then allowed users to view the pages in a Notes client.
Another product that leveraged the Web was a server
"add-in" called the InterNotes Web
Publisher. Now users could take a Notes document, convert it to HTML, and
display it in a Web browser. The server could statically take Notes documents
and publish them to the Web. It was not yet dynamic, because there was a time
delay involved in this process. The documents went to the file server and were
later published to the Web.
Release 4.0 also offered:
In July 1995, IBM purchased Lotus, primarily to acquire the
Notes technology. The buyout impacted Notes in a positive way. Prior to the
buyout, the Notes developers felt that they were facing some strategic
uncertainty as a result of the growing prominence of the Web and increasing
competition in the market. The IBM acquisition provided solid financial
backing, access to world class technology, including the HTTP server that became
Domino, and an increased sales force. Notes now sold to very large Fortune 500
companies, and it sold to entire corporations instead of just departments.
These positive gains gave the developers of Notes the freedom to invest in
long-term projects. In 1996, following the release of Notes 4.0, the business
and technological competition exploded—for messaging products, for Web servers,
and for development systems for these products.
The development of Release 4.0 took more than two years,
which in light of the growing competition and the shorter development cycles of
competitors using the Web to release products, was now too long. In order to
give large enterprises a highly stable Notes system, but also to ensure that
Iris Associates would continue its tradition of technical leadership, the
developers divided the Notes product line into the following two branches:
Even today, at any particular time, there are two Notes
families (or two "code streams") maintained this way, while a third
code stream is underdevelopment for the next feature release.
New users had a choice as to the release of Notes they could
buy. Most new users received the current feature release. As time passed, most
users began to combine the releases, so that on some machines they took
advantage of the new feature release, while other machines ran a maintenance
release version. These two releases of the product did merge at certain points
in the development process. When coding started for a new feature release, all
the code from past releases, including the bug fixes were merged together and a
new code stream began. This merging process happened a few times early in the
development process of the new feature release. This merging process ensured
that the reliability of feature releases was high.
Release 4.5: The Domino theory
Lotus changed the brand name of the Notes 4.5 server
product to "Domino 4.5, Powered by Notes" in December 1996, and
shipped the Domino 4.5 server and the Notes 4.5 client. Domino transformed the
Notes Release 4.0 server into an interactive Web applications server. This
combined the open networking environment of Internet standards and protocols
with the powerful application development facilities of Notes. Domino provided
businesses and organizations with the ability to rapidly develop a broad range
of business solutions for the Internet and intranets. The Domino server made
the ability to publish Notes documents to the Web a dynamic process.
Release 4.5 provided the following improvements:
Release 5.0: Web integration by design
Notes and Domino Release 5.0 shipped in early 1999, as the
160th build since 1984. The R5 code was a direct descendent of Release 1.0 and
parts of its architecture still supported Release 1.0 clients. But, while backwards compatible, R5 was definitely moving into the
future.
With R5's continued Web integration, it was no longer a
question of Notes versus the Internet, they became inseparable. The new user
interface for R5 illustrated this by taking on more browser-type
characteristics. R5 also supported more Internet protocols and extended its
reach to include access to information stored in enterprise systems as well as
Notes databases.
For application developers, Domino Designer, the successor
to Lotus Notes Designer for Domino, offered significant enhancements that make
development more productive. Domino Designer is an integrated development
environment with the tools needed to rapidly build and deploy secure e-business
applications.
The new Domino Administrator made Domino network
administration easier with a redesigned user registration and new tools for
server monitoring and message management. Important enhancements to the Domino
server included:
Release 5.0. was available on Windows NT, Windows 95,
Windows 98, OS/2, Netware, and UNIX. This wide availability, combined with its
ability to entwine Notes with the Internet, set a new standard for:
On the Notes Client side, R5 provided easy access to all
the information that is important to you—whether that information is personal
(like your e-mail and calendar) or public (like your favorite Web sites and
Internet newsgroups). The Notes client included a new browser-like user
interface with a customizable Welcome page for tracking your important daily
information. It also included improvements to the applications you use in your
daily work, such as mail, calendar and scheduling, Web browsing, and
discussions. As interface designer Robby Shaver says when discussing the R5
client, "The number one goal is to just make the client easier."
The Future: Notes/Domino 6 and beyond
Notes/Domino 6 is the next release of Domino and Notes.
Currently in Pre-release, it can be downloaded from the LDD Web site. Notes/Domino 6 provides many new, state-of-the-technology
features. These range from improved overall usability to extended strength in
client mobility. Notes/Domino 6 boasts enhancements in the Welcome Page,
messaging, Calendar and Scheduling, and performance. The Notes client capitalizes
on the innovation of Notes R5 and refines the end-user experience, all without
requiring incremental system resources.
For more information on Notes/Domino 6, see:
And although it may seem a little early to look past Notes
6 and Domino 6 (which after all haven't even been released yet), the
development team is already doing just that. Al Zollar,
at Lotusphere 2002, spoke of some of the early visions planned for upcoming releases
of Notes and Domino. And despite all its many changes over the years, much of
the original vision of Notes/Domino remains intact today. Notes/Domino is
"an information processing agent," says Tim Halvorsen.
"Notes/Domino serves up the information acquired from a variety of
sources." Halvorsen adds that the fundamental
change over time is that the scope of Notes/Domino has become much wider. But
there's still plenty of room for growth. "We haven't done everything we
can do with Notes/Domino."