GoKawiilLotus Notes, in 1989, had encryption two years before Pretty Good Privacy brought it to normal email, had rich text formatting and attachments before MIME, had read receipts, notifications, a directory of users, and wiki-style cross-message links. It, rightly, felt like the future.
Or like déjà vu, if you’d used email on a timesharing computer at your university.
Lotus Notes was the future of communications, a decade before laptops had WiFi. Yet of all things, it wasn’t even an email app. It was a notes app, a collaboration tool, an all-things-to-all-people software that let you build apps in the way Access and Airtable later would. That, and the notes could be used for email.
Love it or hate it (and there were plenty on both sides of the fence), what you couldn’t do was ignore it. This email-and-everything-else platform showed what the future of digital communications would become — and provoked, as email itself was always doomed to provoke, equal measures of awe and exasperation.
When the future’s staring you in the face
PLATO Notes in its orange-and-black glory, via David Woolley’s personal site
The future started out as a plain text file. In 1973, the University of Illinois’ claim to fame was a state-of-the-art timesharing computer, PLATO, built for education—the computer where the first language learning software was built, among others.
PLATO came with “an open text file called ‘notes’,” recalled then-17-year-old David Woolley. “Anyone could edit the file and add a comment to the end,” as a place to leave pointers or log issues or, less helpfully, note that Kilroy was here or delete the entire note. A bit too flexible for an educational environment.
“It was just such an incident that prompted Tenczar to ask me to develop a replacement,” said Woolley. And so he set out to tame the mess with something better. “Some problems might require back-and-forth conversation between a user and the system staff,” he concluded, and built a tool that’d allow up to 63 responses per note, “chained together in sequence ... so that each note could become the starting point of an ongoing conversation.” And in the end, his PLATO Notes, “named after the text file it replaced,” said Woolley, would be one of the earliest online forums, Reddit before its time.
You could start new discussions, respond to existing ones, and read through the comments. And with Personal Notes, the later expansions on the original idea, you could send email-style personal notes, privately, to anyone else. All in a synced database, accessed through individual terminals, in something that offered “a peek at what the Internet would ultimately become,” alum Ray Ozzie told the New York Times after having worked on PLATO as a student.
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