Re: "Notes" to be Eclipsed by "Netscape"

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

>> I've never even _seen_ a copy of Notes running on any machine, nor do I
>> know directly of _any_ of my colleagues who has. (Not saying nobody has, of
>> course, just that I can't find anyone I know well who has.)

Notes was a PC network reimplementation of PLATO, the system that also inspired
notesfiles, a distant cousin of Netnews (though I'm not sure if netnews was
originally inspired by PLATO or not...)  Netnews assumes that articles are
going to propagate for a while and then be trashed; notesfiles assumes you're
building a knowledge bases that sticks around.  (This transitoriness has allowed
netnews to scale to its current N*100MB/day of trash :-) 
 
Notes is oriented more toward business kinds of collaboration, though it would
work fine with university research projects.  It's got all the PCish things
you'd expect, with GUIs and menus and icons that let you include various sorts
of documents and pictures as well as text; it seemed to be done reasonably well,
and there's a growing market for Notes administrators.  One definition of
"business"
is "customers who want this stuff enough that we can charge them big bucks
for the servers"; client software has come down in price due to market
resistance.

One difficulty with Notes is that the earlier versions liked to run on
Novell IPX
instead of TCP/IP, so it didn't immediately jump onto companies' internal IP
nets,
or onto the global net for those brave souls willing to expose their business
communications systems to the world.  I do know companies who run multiple Notes
systems so that Project X can communicate with its teaming partners at
Company Y;
I don't know how much integration they have with their internal Notes systems.

AT&T Network Notes is a joint AT&T/Lotus project that uses AT&T's public IPX
network
to support Notes on; I think it's now rolled out an accepting customers,
but it was mostly in press-release stage while I was at AT&T.

Notes does have encryption, using RSA and I think RC4; I'm not sure if they
do the 
40 bits exportable/ 128 domestic bit or just use 40 bits.  Don't know about
overflow
kinds of bugs; the bugs I've heard about were more problems integrating with
Cc:Mail :-)
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