This week, I think, marks the 10th birthday of Lotus Notes R5. I say “think” because I can’t remember the exact date, but I know that it shipped very late in Q1 of 1999.
I remember Lotus Notes R5 very well for a number of reasons. The first is that I spent two weeks working in Cambridge, Massachusetts (across the Charles River from what is officially Boston) in October 1998 (crumbs, last century). Myself and a team of a few other Lotus colleagues, including Jean Nelson and Craig Iffert, worked on some pre-release collateral for the product. And it was during those two weeks that I made my one and only trip to Westford, where I sat in on a Product Management meeting with the then-Notes client Product Manager – a young man by the name of Ed Brill. I wonder what happened to him…
In April 1999 we held a big launch event for Notes R5 at the London Arena. At the time it was the biggest ever Lotus event in the UK, although it’s now been surpassed by Lotusphere Comes To You. I remember a number of things very clearly…
- It was held the day after Jill Dando was murdered… sounds morbid but it’s one of the things you do remember. I came home at lunch time to put some things together before heading up to London for the overnight stay and the incident was naturally being covered on the news.
- We used to have loads of people in Marketing – they all stayed overnight at the hotel near the London Arena and a huge party of us had dinner. I remember wondering why we needed so many people – indeed, no offence to anyone, many of them were barely involved. The Technical Sales team were, of course, doing all the presentations.
- Cliff Reeves, at that time the head of Product Management, went over-time on his keynote presentation… by at least 30 minutes. The producer Nikki was tearing her hair out.
- The podium which was used for presentations didn’t have a ridge on the bottom edge, so to stop the laptops from slipping off an enterprising roadie gaffer-taped a Mars bar into position. That Mars bar was still stuck in place when the podium arrived in Manchester.
- Attendees asked about Linux and XML. Yes, 10 years ago people were asking when Notes and Domino would be available on Linux. When people asked me about Domino supporting XML, I’d ask “well, what do you want to achieve?” – the resulting confused look told me they didn’t really know why they were asking, it was just one of those things they thought they should be asking. No-one gave me a sensible answer (although in the years since people have done, and Domino supports XML in a number of ways).
It probably won’t amaze you to hear that we do occasionally talk to customers who are still using Notes R5. I met one a couple of weeks ago, and I’m going to see another in April. It amused me and annoyed me when last year I met with people from an organisation who told me “Notes is so unattractive and clunky”. I asked if they knew how old their Notes client version was, and I saw a look of realisation on their faces when I said it was over 9 years old, and I think put it into context for the person who said that Outlook 2007 was much nicer. 8 years on you’d hope a product would look better.
Occasionally I see people in IBM still using Notes 7 (why, I do not know). Having used Notes 8.x for over 2 years I couldn’t imagine using version 7 now and I can’t believe how far the client has come since. Currently I’m using a beta of 8.5.1 and despite being a minor point release upgrade it has a few nice little improvements over 8.5.
Anyway, I’ll close by saying “happy 10th birthday, Notes R5” and let the nostalgia begin.
Many happy returns and thanks for all the air miles R5!
Daz
I checked in an internal website and I found that officially Domino 5 shipped March 20 1999.
Funny enough the date for Notes 5 is March 30; guess typos can’t be avoided 🙂
RoB
Ahh memories…. I remember that event in London Arena too. I’m a little concernded that it was 10 years ago though!!!
Warren
Warren, tell me about it. My daughter was just past her first birthday, and now she has a mobile phone and is school house captain.
I remember getting my first beta copy of 5 via a free CD with one of the PC mags – maybe PCPro. I was working as a Notes trainer at the time – big stress recertifying from R4 but its given me a good careeer since. Thanks
I was at that London Arena bash too. ‘Twas the time of the “I am Superman” adverts, and that song was played incessantly every time there was a break between presentations.
I recall that one of company stands – I can’t remember whose – had the most drop dead gorgeous girl on its staff. There was soon a long queue of blokes, me included, lining up to ask her questions. Of course, when I got to the front she knew absolutely squat about her product!
Funny the things you remember.
Cheers,
– Mike
I remember using Notes 5.0 and 5.0a on a big project. One problem that gave us a lot of grief was how turning on Soft Deletions caused major issues for views that displayed response hierarchies. It was eventually fixed in a later point release but it was several weeks of teeth-gnashing before we figured out what caused the problem and turned off soft deletions.
On the plus side, getting the ability to access view entries that represented categories and view totals was huge. I can’t even imagine how I did simple reports before then.
And how we got to use outlines instead of the horrible navigators. Big change for the better.
Goodness me – doesnt time fly. I’ve still got the T. shirt from the London Arena gig somewhere. Also, if you installed software from the launch CD it played Superman to entertain you.
Now I feel old.
@Darren – ditto here. My youngest was in a crib then, and today he has a cellphone and an attitude.
@9 – oh yes Maria, I forgot the occasional bit of attitude. But she does use OpenOffice and even suggested to her Computer Studies teacher that they use it at school instead of Microsoft Office… so she’s a good girl.
@10, Open Office, not Symphony? 🙂
The kid using OpenOffice pre-dated Symphony, and she’s comfortable with it. As long as she’s not using Microsoft Office I’m not too bothered what she uses.
>I can’t remember the exact date,
>but I know that it shipped very late in Q1 of 1999.
Actually I remember the ship date very well. We produced the build that was supposed to be the gold build on the morning of 31st of March, but we ran into some last minute glitches and by the time we managed to sort them out it was past midnight Boston time.
Someone suggested that we really ought to update the build date, but nobody was willing to ship a major release with a release date of 1st of April. Eventually someone pointed out that it was still 31st of March in Boulder Colorado where the download site was hosted so we were technically correct to leave the build date as it was.
Now aren’t I the sad individual to remember a trivial detail like that :-/
Hey Darren, I remember that Docklands Arena event. Seem to remember that the steps up to the podium were not well lit, and each of us was a little nervous about tripping up the steps in front of [what was at the time] the biggest audience we’d seen.
Now what was that music clip that kept being played?
Darren, thanks for your note. I learned much from that experience. Continued success!
For those of you who don’t know him, Craig Iffert is a legend… he had me and everyone laughing for those two weeks in Boston.