<p>The time was sometime in 1992 or 1993, and I had just moved to New Jersey from California. Back then, I was a Mac guy, having just finished running a variety of HyperCard-related projects for Apple.</p><p>The phone rang. It was an IT manager for The New York Times. She had just gotten off the phone with Apple, and they sent her to me. She was using this new thing called Lotus Notes and she really wanted to get an Apple-like interface for their internal systems.</p><p>Now, you need to understand that this was before the Web. Notes, at the time, looked almost like Web pages would look a few years down the road. It was document-oriented, had data-entry fields that rolled as your scrolled the page, and objects were often tied to the text, not the user interface. It wasn't the Web, but in retrospect, it's interesting to recall that Notes had something of the feel of Web pages, before any such thing existed.</p><p>As it turned out, there was no real way to give the New York Times Notes installation the feel of an Apple product. But as an outgrowth of talking to her, I was curious about this Lotus Notes thing. If they could run the New York Times on it, it might have some legs.</p><p><a href="http://www.zdnet.com/alas-poor-lotus-we-knew-you-well-7000007606/">Keep reading...</a></p>