Discover Lotus Notes–The Fastest Way to a Responsive Organization (1993 demo)

What’s old is new, even if it’s old, and Lotus Notes (nowadays called IBM Notes) certainly is one of those things.

Some of the basic concepts and capabilities of Lotus Notes still are of great benefit to organizations using Notes, even though its fundamental architecture comes from the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of the NoSQL database products that have evolved over the last decade have variations (and improvements?) of what Notes provided way back then

Here’s a little something I’m leaving for posterity, which will possibly bring tears of joy (I hope) to the eyes of anybody associated with Notes in its early days -- in my case that was 1993, starting after my 1992 early retirement from IBM.

Lots of you won’t have seen this diskette-based presentation Discover Lotus Notes–The Fastest Way to a Responsive Organization so I’m giving you the opportunity to run it on your own PC. Only a few minutes of downloading and setup are required.

Firstly, download the zipped diskette image from my website … Discover-Lotus-Notes-1993-diskette.zip 

Please retain a copy for archival purposes (since every year I’m getting closer to my “use by date” and upon my expiration there won’t be anybody to maintain the site so it will disappear into the great bit bucket in the sky).

Then extract the diskette image into a folder called NOTEDEMO on your Windows system (C:) drive, which should contain three files:  AUST.DSP, DEMO.EXE and PLAY.EXE

You need a PC x86 emulator to run the demo, and my suggestion for this is DOSBox, an x86 emulator with DOS but you may prefer something else.

Perhaps run the installer (DOSBox0.74-win32-installer.exe) as Administrator to overcome any execution-time permissions. I suggest this because I’ve found Windows 8 and 10 tend to be rather finicky regarding permissions, but you shouldn’t have any problems with the demo.

There’s a built-in manual to assist you:

Launch the DOSBox emulator, and enter the following three commands (case insensitive):

1. mount  C  c:\NOTEDEMO
2. C:
3. play

The demo fires up, and away you go! Follow your nose through the various sections of the demo (using the keyboard to navigate, not the mouse). Here’s the initial part of the Discover Lotus Notes 1993 demo: