Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch

Lotus Notes, launched in 1989 after five years of development, offered encryption two years before PGP, rich-text formatting, attachments, read receipts, user directories and wiki-style cross-message links, functioning as a collaboration platform rather than a pure email client. Its design traced back to PLATO’s “notes” system, an early online forum created by David Woolley that allowed threaded conversations and private personal notes, influencing Ray Ozzie’s vision for a unified, database-driven communication tool.