Mick Moignard's Blog

It was in 1991.  I was a part of a Guide working party (the International IBM Mainframe users group: Guidance for the use of IBM Data Processing Equipment) shadowing IBM's SAA strategy, and we were looking for some better means that a bulletin board system for keeping the members in contact.  My good friend Tom Willis, then at DGA, was asked by ComputaCenter to look at this Lotus Notes thing - they wanted to know if it was anything useful.    Tom spotted immediately that it would deliver just what we wanted. I went to look at it on August 15, 1991, and placed an order for some licenses from Computacenter the very next day.  That was Notes  2.0.

I liked what I saw, and I could see potential for Notes within Unipart, but at that time we had no network, as we were a mainframe/dumb-terminal user.   Early summer 1992 I build an application to solve a warehouse parts inspection problem, and we deployed it on one server and six workstations, all connected together by modems and dialup on the internal phone system.  At 2400 baud, we thought that was fast, too.  By the way, that application is still in daily use, so at nearly 16 years old, it must be one of the oldest Notes apps around.  

During late '92 and early '93, Unipart installed a LAN at head office, and looked around for an email system to replace our mainframe-based one, which, incidentally, I'd also installed.  That was an IMS-based system we'd bought from Canadian Pacific.  Initial selection was cc:Mail, but my evangelisation of Notes changed that decision, and we're still using Notes today.