How I got started with Lotus Notes

by Volker Weber

I think it was 1994. Wolfgang Hilpert and Oliver Heinz explained the concept in my living room. Bärbel Widhalm sent me the product. I inserted a 3.5" floppy disk into my OS/2 machine which was also running a two line mailbox and a FidoNet Binkley mailer. 16 Megabytes was plenty.

Three months later I wrote my first article on Notes for c't 1/1995, another one for c't 3/1995 and my first Lotusphere report for c't 4/1995. The same year I also architected my first major Notes infrastructure for n thousand people. Two years later Lotus invited me to take CLP tests at CeBIT in Hannover and I passed all exams for Principal CLP Admin and CLP Developer in one day. When I told Ute she asked me why I did not take the Principal CLP Developer exam. Did that the next morning.

Comments

I still remember that session dearly. It took place in Volker’s old living room – in the place where he used to live until recently for pretty much all the years that I know Volker.
And yes, during this session the obvious question “How do you lock a record so that two users don’t try to update the same data at once?” did come up :-) . I remember that after some initial hesitance Volker became quite interested in the potential of building team driven applications rather quickly.
One of the better and more impactful :-) sessions Oli and I did, don’t you think Oli?

Wolfgang Hilpert, 2008-04-08

I remember a OS/2 User Group meeting in Mainz in 1995... You explained Notes to me and some others. Short after that, i'll start my first installation...
Wow! 13 years later and im still hocked on Notes :)

I have to say: Thank you for that Volker :-)
Great Job!

Joerg Hochwald, 2008-04-13

Old vowe.net archive pages

I explain difficult concepts in simple ways. For free, and for money. Clue procurement and bullshit detection.

vowe

Paypal vowe