Network World: Q&A: Light the birthday candles for Lotus Notes (Ray Ozzie)

December 3 2004

Well, I was saving this topic for Tuesday, since the 7th is still next week, but apparently, some couldn't hold back their enthusiasm...

Q: When did you know you had something big with Notes?
Ray Ozzie: I'll say something that let's you see a little bit about my personality: I knew we had something before we started the company. The two guys who started Iris with me -- Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell -- the three of us had been at the University of Illinois in the mid-'70s and had been exposed to a system called Plato, where we first lived the online community experience. We knew what it was like to work with other people at a distance online because we lived it for years.

We lost that when we went into industry. When we graduated from school, they went to DEC and I went to Data General and suddenly we were thrown into this way-back machine of working the old-fashioned way. We had an innate desire to bring back that method of virtual online work that we had experienced before.  

In 1989, because of (Lotus founder) Mitch Kapur and a number of other people who believed in us, we finally had the opportunity to start a company and build that vision.  When we came out with the product in '89, we knew what you could do with it and we couldn't understand why we couldn't communicate to others the difference that they could make.
A wide-ranging walk down memory lane...this isn't the last you'll hear on the subject of the 15th anniversary of shipping Notes (and the 20th anniversary of the founding of Iris).
Link: Network World: Q&A: Light the birthday candles for Lotus Notes >

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [3]

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  1. 1  Neil Gower  | 12/3/2004 12:04:23 PM

    A nice set of adds/articles on IBM home page would be nice...

  1. 2  John http:/www.johndavidhead.com | 12/3/2004 12:43:16 PM

    that's half my life! :)

  1. 3  Bill Geimer  | 12/3/2004 12:59:34 PM

    And in 1974-1976 I was working on Plato at UI using Plato Notes to annotate bugs in the Physics classes and whack them. Boy that was a long time before PCs and the Net. You could talk, work and play (trek) across the globe. And boy did they get P.O.'d when I replaced PHS103 with a hook to to startrek. The good old CDC machine days. But it was only in orange plasma on black (unless you projected a filmstip through the monitor). We sure have gone a long way to black on white in only 29 years.

    If you happen to ever had worked on Plato and miss the colors (both of them) you might want to visit { Link } or see what Ozzie was talking about when he was collaborating way back when at:

    { Link }