bbc article about google wave says "how e-mail would look if it were invented today" - actually it looks how Lotus Notes looked about 20 years ago.
what a lot of people using cr**ppy internet email today don't realize is that early systems for collaboration (Notes, but even Microsoft Exchange) started from a model of sharing documents and sharing editing of documents, and included facilities for managing groups, instant comment/annotation, privacy controls, and multimedia, and predate most of the internet wave of stuff - its amusing that google can rely on the lack of colective memory of the past, and claim they are inventing the future, when really all they've done is re-package an old old old idea (vanevar bush, rip, c.f.)
indeed, the backend for early systems like notes was a database, which meant search/index was optimised already so its even closer to google than you think...
2 comments:
Well, I used Notes from 1994 to 1999. It did have a database backend for e-mail and a rich collaborative editing model. But it didn't have realtime shared editing, or instant annotation.
And it was shit. No-one in their right minds would have wanted the future of the web to have been Notes. Even though, and I completely agree, it did things that the web is now only just getting round to.
And grep was way faster than Notes' so called "indexes".
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