曾经，Lotus Notes 几乎能满足公司的一切需求
Lotus Notes
![](/data/attachment/album/202401/22/144529wt13s8k71t15gxj8.jpg)



> 
> 现在，它的功能分散在无数供应商之间。
> 
> 
> 


技术的进步似乎是线性的，新的技术总是会取代旧的。从这个角度来看，新技术总是更好，因为我们假定新技术是基于旧技术，并对其进行了改进。


但当你年纪渐长，你就会开始意识到这并非总是如此。进步并不总是直线前进的。只要看看个人电脑是如何基本上取代之前笨重的大型机和微型机，然后再慢慢积累那些老系统的先进功能，如多用户支持、冗余和安全性等。


还有一些技术似乎走在了时代的前列，或者说成为业界老鸟们怀念的对象，因为它们提供了当今高科技世界所缺少的东西。


其中之一就是 Lotus Notes，提到它可能会让读者嗤之以鼻，因为它确实有不少缺点；例如，它的资源贪婪让一些用户将这个程序称为 “Notice Loads”。


不过，你几乎可以用 Lotus Notes（加上其 Domino 服务器后端）管理整个公司，许多公司也确实是这样做的。这个程序是电子邮件、数据库和工作流的奇特组合，允许公司在 Notes 里面设置定制的应用，并将它们部署给相关的工作人员群体。


笔者曾在一家广泛使用 Notes 的出版公司工作，我发现它在当时非常有用。它不仅提供了电子邮件，还提供了内部电话簿、联系人数据库、请假系统、公司手册等，所有这些都可以通过单个应用程序和单套凭证进行访问，而这远在单点登录成为风潮之前。


如今，即使不是全部，也是大部分，这些功能都通过独立的基于网络的应用程序提供，每个程序都需要不同的登录方式，因此你需要记住几十个不同的凭证，而且每个凭证都有不同的用户界面。因此，我想你当可以把网络浏览器看作是一个应用程序运行时，它是 Notes 的最终继承者。


如果你想了解 Notes 有多有用，可以参考笔者作为评论编辑，使用过的一个应用。我们的杂志（还记得纸质杂志吗？多么古老啊！）过去每个月的月刊都会刊登大约 30 页的产品评论，我们在 Notes 上建立了一个数据库来帮助跟踪所有内容。


过去，待评论的计算机套件运抵到出版商的办公室后，会给一个序列号，并由工作人员记录到仓库。作为评论编辑，我会在 Notes 上收到产品已到的通知，这样评论编辑就可以知道产品正在等待他们的指指点点，我也可以把它添加到目前正在制作的那期杂志的产品列表中。


出版商的内部摄影师（当时是九十年代，出版商比较有钱）可以看到同一张表格，因此他们知道该为该期杂志拍摄哪些产品。这个工作流程是在 Lotus Notes 上内部构建的。公司里的其他人也有许多类似的应用程序可以使用。


也许我对 Notes 的记忆有些美化，但我记得由于邮件信息链的会话视图，管理邮件变得非常容易，而后来我在一家使用 Outlook 的公司工作时，感觉真是大步后退。


然而，在新千年的时候，Notes 已经开始显得有点笨拙和过时，它的庞大用户群体也开始减少，因为企业开始转向微软 Exchange Server 和 Outlook 的组合，而后者在工作流程方面也许更容易与微软 Office 应用程序和 VBA 集成。


最终，IBM 在 1995 年收购了 Lotus，而在 2012 年，IBM 宣布将完全停用 Lotus 品牌，并于 2018 年将 Notes 出售给印度的软件公司 HCL Technologies。


该平台依然存在，HCL 去年发布了 [Domino 14.0](https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/12/hcl_domino_14/)，正如 The Register 当时评论的那样，这说明了在该平台上构建的定制工作流程的 “粘性”。


有一家公司出版了 Lotus Notes 从诞生到现在的 [详细历史](https://www.stellarinfo.com/blog/complete-history-ibm-lotus-notes-hcl-notes/)，感兴趣的人可以去看看。


但 Notes 并不是所有还在使用的软件中最古老的。据说，为美国国防部（DoD）管理合同的美国国防合同管理机构（DCMA）有一个名为合同管理服务机械化（[MOCAS](https://fossbytes.com/mocas-worlds-oldest-computer-program/)）的程序，该程序于 1958 年推出，因此它的历史几乎是 Notes 的两倍。


*（题图：DA/51b205bf-c1eb-4c58-8663-ff76a64162e2）*




---


via: <https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/19/remembering_lotus_notes/>


作者：[Dan Robinson](https://www.theregister.com/Author/Dan-Robinson) 译者：[ChatGPT](https://linux.cn/lctt/ChatGPT) 校对：[wxy](https://github.com/wxy)


OK
# For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

## Now its functions are shattered between innumerable vendors

Retro Tech Week It may seem that progress in technology proceeds in a linear fashion, with new developments replacing older ones. From this viewpoint, newer technology will always be better, since it is presumed to have built upon what came before it and improved on it.

Grow older, and you start to realize that this isn't always the case. Progress doesn't always go in a straight line. Just look at how personal computers largely replaced the hulking mainframes and minicomputers that came before them, then proceeded to slowly accumulate the advanced features of those older systems, like multi-user support, redundancy, and security.

There are also technologies that seemed ahead of their time, or which industry veterans may look back on with fondness because they offered something missing from our current world of high tech.

One of these is Lotus Notes, the mere mention of which is likely to draw derisory comments from readers because it certainly wasn't without its faults; its resource-hungriness caused the program to be referred to as "Notice Loads" among some users, for example.

However, you could just about run an entire company on Lotus Notes (plus its Domino server back-end), and many did just that. The program was a weird combination of email, databases, and workflow that allowed companies to stand up custom applications and deploy them to relevant groups of workers inside Notes.

This writer worked for one publishing company that used Notes extensively, and I found it to be incredibly useful in its day. It provided not just your email, but an internal telephone directory, contact database, booking system for time off, company handbook, and more, all accessible via a single application and a single set of credentials, long before single sign-on became a thing.

Nowadays, it is common for most if not all of these functions to be delivered via separate web-based applications, each requiring a different login so you need to have dozens of different credentials, and each one sporting a different user interface. So I guess you could regard the web browser as an app runtime that is the ultimate successor to Notes?

If you wanted some idea of how useful Notes was, consider one of the apps this writer had access to in order to support my role as a reviews editor. The magazine (remember paper magazines? How quaint!) used to run about 30 pages of product reviews in every monthly issue, and we had a database on Notes to help keep track of everything.

[40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes](https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/18/elite_game_retro/)[Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi](https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/15/eben_upton_on_sinclair_acorn/)[How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds](https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/16/ql_legacy_at_40/)[What are our top picks from the vast world of retro tech? Let's find out](https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/does_old_tech_never_die/)

Computer kit to be reviewed used to arrive at the publisher's offices and would be given a serial code and logged in to a storeroom by a member of staff. As reviews editor, I would get a notification on Notes that it had arrived, so the reviewer could be told it was awaiting their pleasure, and I was able to add it to the table of products to appear in the magazine issue currently being worked towards.

The publisher's internal photographer (this was the Nineties, when publishers had more money) had a view of the same table, so they knew which products to photograph for that issue. This workflow had been built internally, all on Lotus Notes. There were many similar applications that others in the company had access to.

Perhaps I have a rose-tinted view of Notes, but I recall it being quite easy to manage your emails thanks to a threaded view for email message chains, and it seemed a real retrograde step when I later worked for a company that used Outlook instead.

However, Notes had started to look somewhat clunky and dated by the turn of the millennium, and its considerable user base started to dwindle as corporates defected to the combination of Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook, which were perhaps easier to integrate with Microsoft Office applications and Visual Basic for Applications when it came to workflows.

Eventually, IBM, which had acquired Lotus in 1995, announced in 2012 that it would be discontinuing the Lotus brand altogether, before offloading Notes to Indian software outfit [HCL Technologies](https://www.hcl-software.com/) in 2018.

The platform still survives, with HCL releasing [Domino 14.0](https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/12/hcl_domino_14/) last year, which, as *The Register* commented at the time, speaks to the "stickiness" of the custom workflows built on the platform.

For those interested, one company has published a [detailed history](https://www.stellarinfo.com/blog/complete-history-ibm-lotus-notes-hcl-notes/) of Lotus Notes, from its beginnings to the current day.

But Notes is nowhere near holding the record for the oldest piece of software still being used. The US Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), which takes care of contracts for the Department of Defense (DoD), is said to have a program called Mechanization of Contract Administration Services ([MOCAS](https://fossbytes.com/mocas-worlds-oldest-computer-program/)), which was introduced in 1958, making it nearly twice as old. ®

71