Conference 7.286::digital

    See AXEL::NOTES_HISTORY for some of this...

>    * The earliest extant Notesfile that can still be read with a current
>      DECnotes client;
    
    STAR::NOTES_ARCHD$:[NOTES_ARCHIVE]SYSNOTES_OLD.NOTE is a copy of the
    original notes file (converted to the current format).
    
>    * The discouragement of the engineering crew and their departure for
>      Iris Associates, and their subsequent hi$tory;   :-)
    
    Bad assumption, if by this you think the crew that left did so
    because they were trying to get Notes to be a product at Digital and
    couldn't. Wrong chronology. If memory serves, Tim, Len, Steve, and
    Al left before the effort to productize Notes even started (and it
    was started by someone never associated with Iris). Tim and Len went
    to college with Ray Ozzie (then working on Lotus Symphony) and had
    been involved with Plato, which was the inspiration for Len's
    original Notes tool in the VMS group. It took about five years after
    they left before the original version of Lotus Notes appeared.
    
    So... none of the VMS engineers who went to Iris ever worked on the
    VAXnotes product. Len Kawell had created the original Notes tool,
    but was working on other things when Iris got started (he was out at
    DECwest). I don't think Tim, Steve, or Al ever had anything to do
    with Notes at Digital, other than as users. 
    

    p.s. -- an article on Lotus Notes in the NOTES_HISTORY conference
    referenced earlier erroneously says that Steve Beckhardt developed
    VAX Notes at Digital. Not true.

    Which Notes?  Len's Notes or Benn & Peter's Notes?  Absolutely none
    of the code from Len's Notes surived into the VAX Notes product.
    
    My wife, Roberta Sutter, was the project leader of VAX Notes downstream
    from Benn & Peter.  The engineering team was actively trying to
    rewrite parts/all of VAX Notes into C so it could be ported to
    non-Digital clients, etc.  All of that work was killed by management.
    
    I'd be glad to ask Roberta to write down here memories, but it sure
    will raise her blood pressure!!!
    
    				-John
    
    P.S.  I haven't read the Notes History notesfile so for all I know
    Roberta put something in there before she was TFSO'd back in 93.
    
    

    Wow, those two files are golden!  But they contain SO many of the
    dearly departed, some who in fact have died -- and that's really sad.
    
    For those who won't look, STAR::NOTES_ARCHD$:[NOTES_ARCHIVE]
    SYSNOTES_OLD.NOTE begins on 19-JUN-1980 so that means that groupware at
    DEC^B^BIGITAL is at least almost exactly SIXTEEN years old -- an
    infinity in this biz.
    
    Something to be proud of, despite the speckled and sometimes ambiguous
    history.  And thanks for correcting my mythology, Paul!
    
    /D/
                         

    At least you can say that DEC^B^DIGITAL is consistent.  SIXTEEN years
    of missing the windows of opportunity.  So many good products that never
    go any where.  Why??  It all goes back to one thing - lack of Marketing
    or the individuals in Marketing to create demand pull for our products.
    Everything just dies on the vine.  It's going to happen with Alpha as
    soon as HP and Sun gets rolling with 64 bits.  We're going to wonder
    what hit us again, but this time it will be too late.  At least in
    this final go around there won't be too many left to layoff.
    

re Note 4678.6 by TENNIS::KAM:

>     So many good products that never
>     go any where.  Why??  It all goes back to one thing - lack of Marketing
>     or the individuals in Marketing to create demand pull for our products.
>     Everything just dies on the vine.  

        I know that insufficient marketing is a part of the problem,
        but it isn't the whole problem, especially when software
        layered products is concerned.  The things that do best at
        Digital (I was going to write "do *well* at Digital", but
        reconsidered) are things that the highest level of management
        consider absolutely essential to what Digital is and will be. 
        Processors and systems fall into that category.  Software
        (other than base platform) never has.

        Bob

RE: .6

	I don't think it's the individuals in marketing as much as a
	corporate misunderstanding of how to market. People can be singled
	out for lack of knowledge or expertise. What we are seeing and
	have been seeing for as long as I've been here (almost 16 years)
	is a total lack of understanding what it takes to market a 
	product. I'm no expert (not that that ever stopped me before), but
	man, a Mom&Pop store could market better than Digital as a whole.

							mike

  You saying we couldn't manage a hamburger stand???  Best watch yer back :-)
  

    DEC should hire the marketing firm that Microsoft used for the W95
    hype.

> DEC should hire the marketing firm that Microsoft used for the
> W95 hype.

  Don't start me up with regard to Digital marketing. :-)

                                   Atlant

    Our inability to build and market products for the 90's is well
    illustrated by this review of the TeamLinks product set in the March
    15th issue of Network Computing where groupware was reviewed.   You'll
    note that our conferencing capabilty is rated very highly even against
    the current products:
    
    
    *******************
    
    "The Final Analysis.  After we jumped through the hoops and installed
    the server software on our OpenVMS cluster needed to make TeamLinks
    work, it was awesome.  The mail was great; the conferencing was great;
    the document management was greatl the calendar management was greatl 
    If we didn't like TeamLinks mail interface, Digital offered us special
    drivers for standard cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail that let them talk to
    TeamLinks servers.
    
    We sent and received mail to the Internet, shared documents across Mac
    and Windows platforms, and talked to ourselves with a conferencing
    system that was nearly as powerful as the specialty conferencing
    products from Netscape and Attachmate.
    
    So where's the problem?  Why isn't everyone using TeamLinks?
    
    It's the server.  These are client/server applications.  They're no
    good.  In fact they're worse than useless without a server.  Actually
    the word should be "servers," as in five to seven of them.  TeamLinks
    Mail requires a server and possibly two, depending on whether you want
    to use the less functional TeamLinks Mail server or the more funtional
    All-in-One Mail server.  If you want to link mail to the Internet or to
    other systems across the corporate network, you have to install
    Digital's Message Router as well.
    
    Routing?  A separate server.  Calendar Manager?  Another server. 
    Conferencing? Videotext?  Two more servers.  Digital says that it's
    working on a single integrated server, but that it hasn't hit the
    ground yet and is about four years too late.  In the meantime putting
    all this up for less than a couple hundred users is insanity: too much
    work, too much complexity, too expensive.  Digital's organizational
    chaos and poor management skills have it the number one position in
    groupware and office automation technology."

    Plus the fact that whoever allowed the simultaneous use of "TeamLinks"
    and "LinkWorks" should be ...  oh don't get ME started either.  I have
    .never. repeat NEVER been able to keep those two products straight
    because of pure semantic confusion.
    
    Someone once said that "The fellow who invented those horrid orange
    barrels with the flashing lights that highway departments use to mark
    temporary construction lanes should be strapped to one for 24 hours." 
    I wonder what the appropriate fate for the person in my paragraph 1
    should be???
    

>    Digital's organizational
>    chaos and poor management skills have it the number one position in
>    groupware and office automation technology.

NOW I GET IT. Our internal chaos is our competative advantage! Even a core 
competency!!

    That final paragraph should have read:
    
    Digital's organizational chaos and poor management skills have **COST** it
    the number one position in groupware and office automation technology."
    

Check out the stream at 3485 in this file, where I was curious about
the age of vmsnotes and its relationship to client/server stuff...

-- very_interesting,
   Guy

|    Plus the fact that whoever allowed the simultaneous use of "TeamLinks"
|    and "LinkWorks" should be ...  oh don't get ME started either.  I have
|    .never. repeat NEVER been able to keep those two products straight
|    because of pure semantic confusion.

  Wait .. it gets even better. Way back I worked on prototyping something
  called MEMEX. This was subseqently renamed Hyper Information Services
  when the product transitioned to the US. But, unfortunately, "HIS" was not
  a politically correct name .. so they renamed it to .. ta-ta LinkWorks.

  Now comes ObjectWorks (which I think was the second before last name for
  it). Marketing did not like that name. LinkWorks sounded much better. I
  guess it has more of an "office" ring to it :-)

  I can assure you I had a very hard time containing myself from not
  laughing right into the phone the day someone called me to get an
  impact statement for the retirement of the old LinkWorks. In partciular
  when the purpose of the retirement was to re-use the name, for a
  completely different product, in a completely different space. That
  was about the time they were thinking about naming TeamLinks "TeamTask",
  much to the amusement of our Scandinavian friends.

  >Per

>    to use the less functional TeamLinks Mail server or the more funtional
>    All-in-One Mail server.  If you want to link mail to the Internet or to


Just a nit:  it's  "ALL-IN-1"  (yes, all CAPS and the numeral "1").

  Actually, we *CAN* spell our products correctly. It's the people
  who designed this trademark that can't.

  The reason you will *ALWAYS* find people spelling this particular
  trademark incorrectly is that they know the rules:

    o Spell out numbers that are between zero and nine.

    o In a name, use initial caps except on the insignificant words.



  So they write "All-in-One".

  It's a shame the person who designed the trademark didn't understand
  these simple rules of usage. Or are they different in Charlotte or
  England?
                                   Atlant

    G'day,
    
     I always assumed that the caps in ALL-IN-1 was due to the fact that
    lower case was not used to any extent in those days... in fact KSR33s
    probably did not have lower case...
    
    
    ;-)
    
    And for the record...  All-in-One is a shampoo in the UK.
    
    
    derek  

    Re .17   - aaaah  MEMEX - those were the days.  I remember being
    invited to the design kick-off meeting (was it '85 or '86?) by Bob
    Wyman (he of ALL-IN-1 fame incidentally......)
    
    MEMEX was our inspired implementation of the Vanevaar Bush groupware
    concept (published in 1945).  One of the key ingredients of the V. Bush
    vision was that of "associative trails" or in today's language -
    hyperlinks.
    
    And to make this subject turn full circle, I think VAXnotes must have 
    been one of the very first client/server groupware products to have
    actually implemented wide-area network hyperlinks.  Very primitive by 
    today's standards, but in its time the VAXnotes function "press KP7 
    to add this conference" was one of the main ways that noters were
    referred to other related conferences and hence the "critical mass" 
    concept of groupware.
    
    /Chris.
    

...and to think that about 7 or 8 years ago, I wrote something using TPU, 
BLISS, and Rdb that looked incredibly like Lynx does today. If only I'd patented 
it.

PJDM

    ... In the early '90s I came across a Mac VT Termulator from a company
    owned by Garth Conboy that had a nifty feature...  If the user had OKed
    it in their profile, double-clicking on any numerical string -- such as
    4678.0 -- would extract that string and send it to the server, followed
    by a <RETURN>.  Which, if you were reading DECnotes, had the effect of
    following a hyperlink WITHIN a given notesfile.  "Wow," I remember
    thinking, "now THAT is *cool.*"  Of course it was, dummy -- it was a
    hyperlink and it presaged webbitude!!
    
    :-)
    

re Note 4678.19 by HELIX::SCHMIDT:

>   It's a shame the person who designed the trademark didn't understand
>   these simple rules of usage. Or are they different in Charlotte or
>   England?
  
        My understanding is that the rules of trademarks encourage
        this, i.e., non-standard spelling, punctuation,
        capitalization.

        Bob

Bob:

> My understanding is that the rules of trademarks encourage
> this, i.e., non-standard spelling, punctuation,
> capitalization.

  None-the-less, it explains why this particular trademark will
  *NEVER* be spelled correctly by otherwise-literate people.

  Many trademarks don't have this problem: "Coca-Cola", "Coke",
  "Apple", "H/P", "IBM", "McDonalds", "Big Mac", Burger King",
  and "Whopper" are a few examples. "Macintosh", on the other
  hand, is an example of a trademark that *DOES* have this
  problem, at least among people who are apple-literate.
  However, widespread advertising has increased people's
  recognition of the computer brand name, to the point where
  I suspect the computer breed has wider name recognition
  than the fruit breed.
                                   Atlant

Dan:

  This is still partially true in all competent workstation
  termulators. While it isn't sufficient merely to double-click,
  a double-click will often select the word (for example, "4678.0").
  <Cut>, <Paste>, and <Return> then does the deed.

  It's not as elegant as what you describe, but I use it all
  the time.
                                   Atlant

Anent an earlier reply (DR. Dan's) re being strapped to an orange-and-white- 
striped, blinking-light-topped highway hazard warning barrel: these were said
to have been the personal innovation of one Michael Dukakis when he was 
Governor of the Commonwealth. They were for a time called "Dukakis barrels".
How you might work this into your forthcoming paper on the history of VAXnotes--
I do not know. But I thought I would add this fact, or fiction,as the case may 
be. End of rathole.
Bruce

[Posted by WWW Notes gateway]

   RE: .19

   Hi Atlant,

   When the subject software product was initially developed from Charlotte,
   North Carolina, the naming went as follows:

   "ALL-IN-1 started life as a small piece of code called OATS/OAFS in 1980
   or so, became DECaid in 1981, became CP/OSS (Charlotte Package/ Office 
   System and Services) later that same year.   CP/OSS became available for
   customer purchase in late 1981.

   ALL-IN-1 V1.1 (the first version) was available for customers in the fall
   (September?) of 1982.   It was a natural extension of CP/OSS which was 
   likewise an extension of DECaid."

   The CSI product line announced ALL-IN-1 in Jan (or Feb) 1982 as part of
   CSI's "Advantage program", and was shown at the Spring Decus.

   The Official first announcement of ALL-IN-1 version 1.1 was done at 
   internal DECUS in April of 1982. The OFFICIAL FIRST SHIP was done from the
   SALEM plant in June of 1982.

   The bottom line is that THE product has been around solving customer
   problems for a LONG time, bringing lot$ of revenue into Digital.

    Well! thanx Bruce, I guess I deserved that closure, since 'twas I that
    brought it up in the foist place. :-)  ... and I *do* remember that
    term from Dukakis' tenure, now that you mention it.
    
    RE-end of rathole.
    
    (obtw who was it who invented the "rathole" in computer conferencing? 
     Prollly someone lost in the mists of time at UIUC, PLATO-land...)
    
    :-)
                                                       

During the 1986-87 debate over Window Systems (X vs Sun's NeWS), I
remember attending an X Symposium at MIT, when Hania Gajewska (who was
then a DECie) said:

        One of the things I like about X is that it is easy to remember
        which letter to capitalize.

Ram

               <<< IOSG::USER3:[NOTES$LIBRARY]ALL-IN-1.NOTE;5 >>>
                     -< ALL-IN-1 (tm) Support Conference >-
================================================================================
Note 13.3          Spelling of ALL-IN-1 - why does it matter?             3 of 3
IOSG::PYE "Graham - ALL-IN-1 Sorcerer's Apprentice"  23 lines   1-JUL-1994 11:50
                   -< ALL-IN-1 Is A _Registered_ Trademark >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Below is a mail message that we received from the corporate legal
    department verifying that ALL-IN-1 is a trademark.  I have removed
    all names.

From:	Someone in LAW DEPT; 223-5511  21-Apr-1989 1129"
To:	SHALOT::someone
Subj:	ALL-IN-1 Trademark

ALL-IN-1 is a Digital trademark!!!  The process of registering the mark
is underway.  Registration has occurred in a limited number of countries;
is pending in the United States; and is likely to occur in a large number
of counties in the near future.

Registration of a term is not required in order for it to be a trademark.
Registration, however, stengthens the rights that exist in a mark because
it gives better notice to the others that a term is being used as a 
trademark.

Hope this helps.  Please call me if you'd like to discuss this further.

Regards, 
    
    PS A1INFO Note 535.17 has rather more detail on this...

    Re: .25
    
    > Many trademarks don't have this problem: "Coca-Cola", "Coke",
    > "Apple", "H/P", "IBM", "McDonalds", "Big Mac", Burger King",
    > and "Whopper" are a few examples. "Macintosh", on the other 
    > hand, is an example of a trademark that *DOES* have this 
    > problem, at least among people who are apple-literate.
    
    Atlant, of the trademarks that don't have this problem... it 
    is "HP", not "H/P"; "McDonald's", not "McDonalds"; and
    probably also "BigMac", not "Big Mac". ;-)
    
    ...petri

   However, it has always struck me as both arrogant and deflective that
   whenever "ALL-IN-1" is mentioned, and the trademark misspelt, that some-
   one from the group must jump to the correction.

   Perhaps it's just from negative past experience;  I used to work on a
   product which incorporated parts of A-1 (;-)) and I remember people in my
   group entering problem reports in the ALL-IN-1 notesfile.  The problem
   report was generally ignored, due to it pointing out a "design flaw", but
   the respondents were ever-so-quick to correct trademark mis-use.  (This
   was over 14 years ago though, and things may have changed.)

   -- Sam

    They probably got that from the trademark LAWYERS..., can't imagine an
    engineer being "both arrogant and deflective".  :-)
    
    Mark

    I used to be in the Canadian ALL-IN-1 group. It was explained to me
    that if we (Digital) could/would not use the name properly, we
    would/could loose the right to exclusive use of that name.
    
    							Derek.

    
    	That's true of all trademark/copyright issues.
    

Well to further this rathole, isn't it cool that DECnotes wont
be troubled by the year 2000 problem!

-- cheers,
   Guy

What I want to know is - why didn't we trademark the name "Notes"?  It was
a real product long before Lotus released Lotus Notes.  Seems like they
took a good product name and went big with it.

adam

    Well I wasn't here then, but I'll bet that we (at some level) were
    actively holding our ears shut to any mention of DECnotes or VAXnotes
    and shouting "ALL-IN-ONE(tm)-ALL-IN-ONE(tm)-ALL-IN-ONE(tm)..."  :-)
    
    And to be fair, I don't believe that any sort of popular, mass-market
    groupware would have been possible prior to the availability of good
    cheap PCs with GUIs like Mac and Windows.  At the time (correct me on
    this chronology, O Those Who Were There) that the future creators of
    Iris/Lotus Notes left DIGITAL, those PCs and those GUIs were only
    ramping up.  I recall some history that "it took 5 YEARS before they
    had a working version of Notes to demo for Manzi at Lotus."  Now
    everyone knows that 5 years was then, and still is, an eternity in this
    biz.  
    
    So when the DECNotes crowd left Digital (and gathered from elsewhere)
    to create Iris, it was too early for DIGITAL Management to care about
    pre-empting the name for future use.  
    
    In retrospect, we SHOULD have seen what the DECnotes crowd did:  that
    mass-market GUIs would enable the groupware market they found so
    helpful and addictive as charcell-users.  And that mass-market GUIs
    were inevitable as PCs became ubiquitous.
    
    So, the DECnotes crowd left DIGITAL after having failed to convince us
    to proceed.  Why glom the name?  We didn't understand what we had.
                                            

>    So when the DECNotes crowd left Digital (and gathered from elsewhere)
>    to create Iris, it was too early for DIGITAL Management to care about
>    pre-empting the name for future use.  
    
    To repeat: this did not happen. Several engineers from Digital
    joined one or more from Lotus to start Iris, but it was *not* "the
    DECNotes [sic] crowd". The only connection with a Digital notes
    engine in the people who founded Iris was Len Kawell, who'd written
    the original internal-only tool, and he hadn't been even
    peripherally involved in Notes for two or more years at that point.
    

    Sorry Paul, but from this point in my own personal reconstruction of
    the apparent chronology of "Notes" at DIGITAL, I (perhaps creating
    horses to be beaten later) don't make the same distinction you do
    between Kawell (who wrote "the original internal-only tool") and "the
    DECnotes crowd" (whom you imply REwrote that engine into what became the
    externally-visible VAXnotes and later DECnotes).
    
    I guess another part of your point is that Kawell (presumably) had
    either gotten discouraged about productizing his internal-only tool, or
    else interested in something else.  The fact that he later left to help
    found Iris suggests the former, to me at least.
    
    But I guess I see the 
    	* (hair you're splitting)
        * (fact that I'm beating a dead horse)
    
    :-)                                                               OK?

    Of course, another thing is that SOMEone "the DECnotes crowd" actually
    DID get to productize DECnotes.  Just that they did it mostly in
    charcell mode and never got the OK to express the vision of that
    product on PC platforms, with a full client-server GUI client...
    

    Many of the features you see in VAX Notes/DEC Notes were not part of
    KNOTES.  To give Len (and folks at Iris) credit for all the good ideas 
    in the final Notes product isn't correct.  The people who actually 
    wrote the real VAX Notes got tons of comments/suggestions from internal 
    users.
    
    I've never heard the story from Benn or Peter on the push for doing a
    real VAX Notes product.  Perhaps somebody should send a mail off to
    Benn and get the real scoop.
    
    				-John

    I'm not looking for an argument (and abuse is down the hall), but
    I think you're experiencing wishful motivation projection. Iris was
    founded because some people saw an opportunity to get involved in an
    entreprenurial effort based on some common experiences. Not because
    of any failure to get that technology working at DEC. (Remember, it
    was Ray Ozzie that got Iris started and funded, not Len Kawell.)
    
>    I guess another part of your point is that Kawell (presumably) had
>    either gotten discouraged about productizing his internal-only tool, or
>    else interested in something else. 
    
    I don't recall Len ever seeming interested in productizing it at
    DEC. (I knew Len less well than I knew the other Iris founders.) He
    put together a midnight-hack tool based on his experience with
    Plato. When the tool worked, he was done with it. That's my
    recollection. 
    
    Later, Ray Ozzie contacted some of his old college Plato chums when
    he wanted to start a start-up based on Plato concepts. Len was one
    of them, Tim was the other. Ray never worked for DEC. The other
    DECcies that got involved were friends of Len and Tim. They saw the
    opportunity to get involved with an interesting start-up, and
    pursued it.
    
>    Of course, another thing is that SOMEone "the DECnotes crowd" actually
>    DID get to productize DECnotes.  Just that they did it mostly in
>    charcell mode and never got the OK to express the vision of that
>    product on PC platforms, with a full client-server GUI client...
    
    ... and this was a TOTALLY DISJOINT SET OF PEOPLE. None of them
    were founders of Iris. None of the founders of Iris had anything to
    do with either the productizing of Notes at Digital, or of any of
    the intermediate versions (Notes-11 or VNOTES). 
    

    In terms of the chronology: the genesis of Iris was somewhere around
    late '84 or early '85 if memory serves. That's roughly when the Mac
    was coming out, and I recall we had a Xerox Star down in the VMS lab
    at that time, which was about the first commercial mouse-based
    windows-desktop paradigm available. Microsoft Windows didn't become
    an interface that anybody really got excited about until version 3,
    which was (help me here) around 1990 (versions 1 and 2 were jokes,
    though if you were farsighted you could see what was coming).
    
    The initial version of Lotus Notes ran on OS/2 only.

    >    The initial version of Lotus Notes ran on OS/2 only.
    
    I thought the server was OS/2, and they had multiple client 
    platforms.
    

    re .46
    
    You're probably right.
    
    
    To try to verify my recollection of the dates, I checked Alta Vista
    and turned up the following, which predates the sale of Lotus to IBM
    (and which also confirms Ozzie as providing the motivation behind
    Iris and demonstrates that Plato is the common ancestor of both
    K-Notes and Lotus Notes, rather than K-Notes being the ancestor of
    Lotus Notes). In particular, notice that Ozzie wanted to found Iris
    and create a Notes product before he even worked on Symphony.
    
    I like the bit about them feeding "punched cars" to an IBM360...
    
--------------------------
http://ftp.cs.uiuc.edu/CS_INFO_SERVER/ALUMNI_INFO/newsletter/v1n2/iris.html


Highlight from Winter 1993

[Image]

>From Plato to Iris: The force behind Lotus Notes

Three former Plato Programmers, Ray Ozzie '79, Len Kawell '77, and Tim
Halvorsen '77 remained close friends after graduation. Together they went on
to write Notes, Lotus's flagship product, from their home company, Iris
Associates, which they founded in 1985.

Notes, an innovative networking program, is the hottest thing going at Lotus
Development Corp. Sales of Notes is expected to reach $100 million by the
end of this year and to continue at an explosive rate as more and more
companies build their networks around Notes. Notes is the brainchild of Ray
Ozzie (BS'79), founder and president of Iris Associates, and his
collaborators Tim Halvorsen (BS'77) and Len Kawell (BS'77), both vice
presidents. Iris and Ozzie recently drew major media attention in a Wall
Street Journal article which opened with a quote from Microsoft chairman
Bill Gates, Describing Ozzie as "one of the top five programmers in the
universe." Written at Iris, Notes is being marketed by Lotus. "We control
the product, but Ray is the godfather and the source of inspiration of the
whole thing," says Lotus chairman Jim Manzi. "It's the center piece of
everything we're doing."

The origins of Notes like with Ozzie, Halvorsen and Kawell and their days at
Illinois as programmers on the Plato system at CERL (Computer-Based
Education Research Lab). During the 1970s, computer resources were extremely
limited. Students were subject to learning computer science by feeding
punched cars to an IBM 360 in DCL. However, on the other side of Springfield
Avenue, instead of sitting at keypunches doing numerical analysis, people
were playing interactive, multi-player games and communicating with each
other as they sat in front of the orange and black plasma screens of the
Plato system.

Though Plato was a system of terminals connected by a mainframe (first a
Cyber 6500 and later a Cyber 170-730), it had the look and feel of today's
PC networks. "It was really compelling," says Ozzie, "so I was bound and
determined to become a programmer on that system." He switched majors from
electrical engineering to computer science, and in 1975, he landed a systems
programming job on Plato. There he met Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell.

Len Kawell was a Plato operator, and like Ozzie, he became enamored with
Plato's communications capabilities. The Plato system had pnotes (personal
notes), the equivalent of e-mail, and gnotes (group notes), perhaps the
earliest form of electronic newsgroups. (Pnotes was written by Kawell's
roommate Kim Mast. Gnotes was written by Dave Wooley.) Users could also
"talk" to each other in real time. In the age of the Internet, this might
seem mundane, but in the early 170s, it was revolutionary.

Tim Halvorsen became a computer science major as soon as the degree was
offered, and from his sophomore year until graduate school, in which he
spend one year, he "hung out on Plato" non-stop. Employed at Plato full-time
while going to school, also full-time, he was able to finance his education
(and get very little sleep!). During his first year of work, he spend most
of his time writing courseware, in Plato's language Tutor, for the prison
systems under the Plato Corrections Project. This provided a way for
prisoners to learn without the security risk associated with conventional
educational programs. After that, Halvorsen joined the systems group to work
on systems software, multiprocessor support, and database functionality. "It
was a crazy schedule," Halvorsen admits, "but a good time."

It was time to graduate and the options for the three were Silicon Valley or
Route 128 near Boston. The three chose the east coast: Ozzie to Data General
and Halvorsen and Kawell to Digital Equipment Corp.

At Data General, Ozzie worked on a project which now could be described as a
client/server system. Halvorsen and Kawell worked on VAX. As the personal
computer industry was just starting to emerge, Ozzie went to Software Arts,
publisher of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. "It was lots of
fun. We ported VisiCalc to lots of PCs. It was during that time that I
started, in my head, to tie local area networks to PCs. And I though, This
is it!"

A friend of Ozzie's from Data General days, Jonathan Sachs, had just written
the spreadsheet 1-2-3 for Lotus as a competitor to VisiCalc. Sachs coaxed
Ozzie to join him at Lotus, but Ozzie turned him down because he was working
on "this other thing," which eventually became Notes. Mitch Kapor, Lotus's
founded, made a deal with Ozzie. If Ozzie would work on spreadsheets at
Lotus for a year, they would help him get started on the "other thing."
Ozzie served as the lead programmer for Lotus's Symphony. the day Symphony
was shipped, Kapor told Ozzie to polish off his business plans and to show
him what he had. Ozzie spent six months negotiating with Lotus. Because
1-2-3 was doing well, Lotus decided to speculatively fund his company. Ozzie
called it Iris, another flower, and launched the venture on December 6,
1984.

Meanwhile, Kawell had similar networking ideas while working at DEC. When he
started, he began work on DEC's VAX project. "I started digging into it on
my own and discovered that it didn't have any e-mail or group notes," says
Kawell. So, independently, he built a mail program modeled after Plato's
pnotes. After changing it to suit the DEC environment, it eventually became
VMS Mail. A little after working on the first version of VMS Mail, again
working in his "spare" time, Kawell decided to build his own version of
Plato's gnotes. This ended out becoming DEC's Notes, which was the prototype
for VAX Notes (still in use today). Kawell's "real" projects were VMS and
DECNet. In 1982 Kawell joined Dave Cutler at DEC's new Seattle facility to
build the first MicroVAX and a real-time operating system called VAX ELN.

Halvorsen also took a job with DEC and started working on the VAX/VMS
project in 1976. He was to work on the VMS operating system for nine years,
at first on various VMS utilities such as the system dump analyzer. He also
wrote VAX Talk, based on Plato's term-talk. He was the project leader for
DECNet for a number of years before becoming project leader for the first
VMS workstation and working on its software architecture.

The three kept in touch ever since they left school. When Ozzie got the
funding from Lotus for what was to become Notes, he formed Iris and a month
later, on January 21, 1985, he was joined by Kawell and Halvorsen. Joining
Iris was a tremendous risk at the time for both Kawell and Halvorsen,
leaving DEC in the midst of VMS development. Steve Beckhardt also came over
from DEC, and the four of them wrote the first version of Notes. Several
more people came aboard, and the small group embarked on what was to be an
18-month project. Instead, it took almost five years before they were able
to ship their product, Notes, to their first customer in 1989. "It took off
like rocket," says Ozzie. He sold the rights to Lotus in 1988, and Notes now
represents about 10% of Lotus's profits.

Iris grew quickly. When the first version of Notes was introduced, Iris had
seven people on its payroll. When the second version came out, the company
expanded to 15. By version 3, it had grown to 25, and now, at version 4,
Iris has grown to 42. At Lotus, which now has over 4,000 employees, almost
500 work on Notes. This setup allows Iris to do what it does best and what
its people enjoy the most: programming.

Ozzie is careful to preserve the small team aspect of his company which he
feels provides an ideal environment and focus for his programmers. In the
Wall Street Journal, John Wilke describes the ambiance at Iris in theatrical
terms: "Its employees create code in a warren of comfortable offices arrayed
around a plush room with couches and a bust of Elvis Presley. The room is
dubbed the Crash Pad, after the living room in Iris's first home, where
people went not to sleep, but to wait out frequent computer-network crashes
that halted work. Around this hub, the soft clicking of keyboards drifts
from darkened rooms where intense young software engineers are lost in their
work. Cases of candy bars and cola fill a small kitchen." In fact, if you
are put on hold while calling Iris on the phone, you will hear Elvis
crooning in the background. Halvorsen explained that the running Elvis joke
at Iris stemmed from a brainstorming session during which several Iris
programmers were thinking up databases they could set up. They decided an
"Elvis sightings" database would be really useful.

Sharing their common roots at Illinois, Ozzie, Halvorsen, and Kawell
continue to enjoy working together, and they are working harder than ever.
Companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and WordPerfect are all positioning
themselves to introduce Notes-like products in the near future. "Now that
we've broken through," says Ozzie, "the best we can do is to keep our eye on
the ball."

[Image]
Comments to: [email protected]

--------------15FB59E21CFB--


------- End of Forwarded Message

    

    Hi Paul -- Cool!  I finally understand!!! :-)  Tnx for breaking down
    the WMP (Wishful Motivation Projection) and for correctly diagnosing
    the unfortunate condition.
    
    OBTW -- Which way didja say abuse was?
    

    ... and I still missed yer point...
    
    Aieee
    

    BTW, dr. dan, the trademark is ALL-IN-1 (not ALL-IN-ONE).
    
    8-)

    OmiGod, take me now...  I'm ready...
    
    (-: (-: BLUSH :-) :-)
    
    

Re .33: You'll get something like the same reaction from the PATHWORKS people if 
you get the case wrong. "If you don't use it properly it'll get taken away."

Then there's Dan "I don't care if the box says Digital UNIX, uname says it's 
OSF1" Pop.

PJDM

  Maybe if someone had swiped the trademark, it'd be better known.

                                   Atlant



P.S.: Yes, I know this note will evoke the required response:

     "Digital has made zillions-and-zillions of dollars selling
      ALL-IN-NONE and if it weren't for that product, there would
      have been terribble layoffs and losses and the stock would
      only be worth $40 or so."

RE: .53

>>> Just that they did it mostly in charcell mode and never got the OK to 
>>> express the vision of that product on PC platforms, with a full >>> 
client-server GUI client...

Well, eventually somebody go to express Notes in a GUI as in
DECwindows Notes (X-windows) and Pathwork Conferencing (Windows PC), plus 
Usenet news gateways.



						-Paul

re: ALL-IN-1...

there was an early attempt to more tightly interface ALL-IN-1 with notes.  Bob
Wyman was on a push to try and get as many products using ALL-IN-1 key 
definitions as possible.  While I don't think he got THAT far, today notes
still supports the $ command which, like ALL-IN-1, executes a SPAWN.

-mark

        Hey, it does!!  And here all along I've been SPAWNing... :-)
        

    Geez - calm down Dan - it's not *THAT* exciting....

    Hey c'est l'heure, at MY age, $ is more exciting than SPAWNing... :-)
    

    ... though, actually, typing 'sp' is (for me) faster than typing '$'
    anyway ...

>    ... though, actually, typing 'sp' is (for me) faster than typing '$'
>    anyway ...

Sorry, I don't have a clue what you guys are talking about!  The only
way I know how to spawn a new process is to put a & at the end of the
command.

    Here's the deal Ram.  You tell us what PBPGINFWMY means, we'll give you
    a clue...
    
    :-)
    

>    Here's the deal Ram.  You tell us what PBPGINFWMY means, we'll give you
>    a clue...
    
It means "Please be patient, God is not finished with me yet!"  In other
words, I wear a "work in progress" sign around my neck.

Now what's the clue :) ?

Ram

    

    Tnx... :)
    
    There's two ways (now) that I know how to push a command level below
    NOTES such that when I'm done, I can pop to return to my NOTES
    session-in-progress.  The first used to be SPAWN, now there's another.
    
    HTH :>