Monthly Archives: April 2008

Lately I have been thinking back on my career. You may have read my two postings about how I started with Notes and how I started with computers in general. This made me start thinking: what is it with Lotus Notes that I find so fascinating?

I remember how impressed I was with Visual Basic when the first version came out in 1991. I had previously been writing code using Turbo Pascal, QuickC and Turbo C, so a tool that let you draw the user interface and place controls in a graphic way was a big thing.

I used Visual Basic for several years, I may have been among the few programmers going from C and Pascal to Basic… But in a business environment it makes sense to use a tool that let you build application fast and efficient, not spending days to code the user interface.

While I worked as a journalist in the 1990’s, I looked at many other tools as well, like PowerBuilder, Delphi, Visual Caf?a Java development tool from Symantec which later got bought by Borland and integrated into JBuilder). I realized that this kind of RAD tool is what I should learn.

That I ended up working with Notes was more luck than skill, though, as you can read in my other blog entry.

The great thing with Notes is that I get so much for free. The user interface is mostly there, I just have to design the forms and views, set some colors and then I can write the business logic. All the database functionality is there, etc. What is there not to like? Well, we all know there are a few things that can be improved, but overall, Notes is a very powerful development platform…

A little while ago I wrote about how I started with Lotus Notes. When I read some other people’s descriptions, they told more of their background how they got into computers as well. This has prompted me to share (if anyone really care) how I started with computers.

Back in 1974 or 75 or so, when I was 5-6 years old, my then about 20-21 year old cousin from Blekinge (where my dad was born and grew up and where most of his family lives) moved up to Stockholm. After his military service in the Swedish navy (seems like most males on my dad’s side did the service in the navy, for some reason) he got a job at Hewlett-Packard. I think he started as a service technician. For the first few months he was living with my family, and he brought home a couple of different computers. Most of all I remember him bringing home a plotter one evening. I believe he even hooked it up to the phone line and downloaded some images that were then printed on the plotter. Some were just geometric patterns, but for many years I had a Snoopy cartoon created that night on my wall in my room.

In 1981 one of my good friends in school got a VIC-20. The first day he had it, we sat for hours in his room and typed in a program listing for a game from the manual. Of course it did not work. :-) My friend started programming in his spare time, but my parents could not afford a computer.

When I started 7th grade in 1982, the school had been choosen as one of the four schools in the country to participate in a new government sponsored program to increase the computer knowledge in schools and to develop a Swedish computer for school use. Some different products were evaluated, including (if I remember correctly) MicroBee, TRS-80 and a couple of other systems. In the end a brand new computer was developed, based on the 80186 processor and using CP/M-86 as operating system. My school recieved a number of older Swedish made computers, the Z80-based ABC 80 and ABC 800 while the new computer, called “Compis” (an abreviation of “Computer in School” and also meaning “friend” or “buddy” in Swedish) was developed.

The school decided to start a computer club, and I was there for the first meeting in fall of 1982. The school provided a room for the computers and a card reader. To get a pass card, you had to take 3 evening classes, led by older students or teachers, in Basic programming. Then you got your card and could use the computers any time the school was open and the computers were not used by a class.

I believe I went to the classes right after christmas 1982. My family spent the Christmas break in Blekinge, and I brougth some programming books, read them and wrote programs on paper since I did not have any computer.

Starting in January 1983, I was spending most of my free time in the computer room, learning to program mostly on my own or with help from fellow students. In 1984 we got some prototypes for Compis, and in 1985 the production version was released. The programming languages were COMAL (a structured language that was a mix between Basic and Pascal) and a version of Turbo Pascal 3. I quickly switched to Pascal, and (to my parents dissatisfaction) started spending every free hour in the computer room. I printed my programs on continuous sheets and taped them to the wall of my room so I could look at and read the code, make notes and then bring it back to school and fix any bugs. I even managed to convince the school to let me borrow a computer home over some vacations…

In Sweden, school is mandatory for 9 years, with 2 or 3 years “optional”, but in reality most students will go those extra years. Those last years are similar to what is called High School in the US, but it is (just like in Germany) called “gymnasium”. According to Wikpedia, they are comparable to “college preparatory high schools” in the US.

Since the 80’s, the system has changed, but at that time you had to choose between 5 different 3-year programs, where the subjects and hours were pretty much set. There were some small adjustments we could make, like choosing between psychology and philosophy. I took the “natural science program”, where the main subjects were math, physics, chemistry and biology. Of course we also had languages (Swedish, English and in my case German), history, geography, social science, sports, philosophy (in my case) and a few more.

The other programs were an engineering/technical, humanistic/languages, social studies and financial/economics

So why did I take this program? I hated math, and it was always one of my weaker subjects. Well, this program also included computer science and programming. That’s the only reason.

During these years, I wrote a bunch of different programs, including my first commercial product. It was a geography learning tool for use in schools, showing a country on a map and asking the student for the name and capital, keeping track of points, etc. I sold a couple of copies to a few schools.

I also started using modems at this time, we had a 1200 baud (later 2400) in the computer room, and you paid by the minute (since the phone company in Sweden charg by the minute, no flat fee for local calls). We even had our own BBS for a short time.

After graduation in 1988, I choose to take a one-year systems programming class at a different school. It was an intensive class, cramming 2 years into one by having classes 8 am to 5pm every day, with just a lunch break. and two short breaks in the morning and afternoon. Well, after about a week, the teachers said that the number of students were not sufficient to run the class. They had tried to get a few more to join, but they had to cancel the class. The class would start again in January 1989.

So I picked up the Yellow Pages and looked under computer companies. I called a few places about an internship, and at one company I got a positive response. They were looking for someone in their support department. I was asked to send in my paperwork, grades, etc. A week later I went to an interview with the head of the support department, who happened to live on the same island where I grew up and lived. The interview went something like this:

“Have you ever user Microsoft Word?”

“No, we used WordStar and another word processor in school.”

He started Word for DOS 3.x: “Here, type something”

I typed a few words.

“Select some text and make it bold.”

I selected some, not sure if I used the keyboard or the mouse. I had used a mouse just a few times in the past.

To make it bold, I had no clue how to do it. I knew ^K^B in Wordstar, and Alt-F in the Swedish word processor we also used in school. I saw “help” in the menu, so I clicked on it, and noticed that most commands used the Alt key here as well. So I first tried Alt-F (bold in Swedish is “fet”). I then realised it was an english version of Word, so I
tried Alt-B.

“Good. What is yor salary requirement?”

That’s how I got a job at Microsoft…

I worked at Microsoft that fall, and during the summer break next year. After I graduatued the systems programming class in December 1989, I alternated between Microsoft and teaching C programming and english at a gymnasium down the street. At the same time, I got my forst computer, a 386SX-based machine with 256 MB memory and 20 GB harddisk. I quickly upgraded the memory to 1 MB, got a better graphics card (Tseng Labs ET3000) and got me a 2400 bps modem from a co-worker at Microsoft. This is when I started visiting BBSes more frequently.

In April 1990 I started 11 months of military service with the 16th Fighter Wing in Uppsala, about an hour north of Stockholm. After the service I intended to go back to Microsoft, but I was hired by a company called Esselte Voice to program IVR systems (Interactive Voice Response). After two years of doing this, the company went bankrupt. I now had a 486 computer with a 200 GB SCSI harddisk, and 4 MB of memory.

A good friend of mine saw an ad in the newspaper for a publishing company looking for a tech support person, and in the same ad they also were looking for a journalist. I appled for both jobs, and amazingly enough, I got the job as a journalist, writing about PC hardware and software.

We are now at the point whee I started my article about how I got into Lotus Notes, and you can continue there if you haven’t read it already.

Theo Heselmans blogged about how he got into Notes back in 1993, so I thought it would be fun to share my story.

In 1993 I worked for IDG in Sweden as a journalist. The company used Lotus cc:Mail, but made a company-wide descision to use Lotus Notes. I believe it was in late 1994 that Notes 3 was started to be used at the Swedish subsidary , and in 1995 it was widely used there, despite some complaints, mainly from one editor-in-cheif/business unit leader who tended to give his staff older, slower computers with too little memory… Everybody else liked it, especially since IDG centrally had several good databases that replicated from Boston to publications all over the world with the latest news. This service, IDG News Service, was extremely useful for us journalists.

I was of course writing about Notes, as well as about Microsoft products. I went to the predecessor of Lotusphere Europe in 1996, which took place in Holland. I was still not a Notes developer. I had worked for Microsoft earlier, and were developing some internal applications in VB and MS Word for the other journalists. I also played around with HTML and developed the first homepage for Computer Sweden, the publication I worked at.

We upgraded to Notes 4.0 and then 4.5. Some users started playing around, developing Notes applications. One of the guys in accounting developed a purchase order system for us in his spare time, for example.

In early 1997, the owner of a small PR agency, who did PR for Lotus, Sun, Adobe, Epson and a number of other companies, asked me if I knew HTML. He needed some help with the HTML for some homepages he worked on. After getting approval from my employer, I spent some evenings at his office helping him putting HTML code into his Notes applications he was web-enabeling. During this time I started groking Notes development. We also upgraded to Notes 4.6, where I as a developer got a number of new features.

It was during the summer of 1996 I started developing actual Notes applications myself. The first big one was an archive of all articles published by Computer Sweden in the last few years. They had the articles (in several different formats) on a file server. I built the archive, then parsed and imported about 20,000 documents with different control codes (some even plan text files lacking control codes so I had to write code to analyze what was what in the files).

I continued playing around with Notes, and after I got married to an american girl in 1997, I got a job with IDG News Service in Boston as a Notes developer.

When I told the editor-in-chief that I was moving, he ordered me to develop an editorial system in Lotus Notes before I left. In 3 weeks, while I was also trying to pack up my apartment (alone, my wife had already went ahead to the US to prepare things), I developed the editorial system. As of last summer, it was still in use after almost 10 years with no major modifications! Several times attempts were made to replace it with (expensive and complicated) commercial solutions, but they all failed for different reasons, mostly because this application was perfectly suited for their needs. The development cost was probably (counting my salary) about 1800 dollar, which over 10 years make a yearly cost of 180 dollar, or perhaps 6 dollar per user and year for the about 30 users… Not a bad ROI…

At IDG News Service I built a number of applications, did more advanced solutions and started working on Notes R5 when it was rolled out. In 2002 I moved to the Dallas area to work for an insurance company as a Notes developer, and here I still am. And still on Notes 5(!), even if we now (finally) are moving to Notes 7. Notes 8 is not an option, most of the computers in use only have 256 MB of RAM, 512 MB in a few and 1 GB only in the newest ones.

This morning I was on the way to work. I had spent the night at my ex-wife’s house, watching our son while she worked. Normally he comes over to me, but I have to work late this week so we did like we done in the past, she get him into bed and I go over there when she is about to leave for work. Anyway, this morning I woke him up, got him dressed, fixed breakfast and sent him to school. I then got into my car. About 2/3 of the way to work, I was stopped an the onramp to SH-360 in Arlington, behind a Sears service van. I had been stopped for about 10-12 seconds, when the car suddenly was thrown forward and smashed into the van in front of me. Of course I had the breaks applied, but that did not help. The front of my car was pretty damaged, headlights crushed/hanging, hood crumpled, radiator leaking…  My back is a bit sore as well, despite me (of course) wearing seat belt. The guy that hit me (he was in a nice big Cadillac) also got some serious damages to his front, while my rear was not too bad. Luckily the airbags did not deploy. The third car, the van, had no damages. Seems like the rear of cars are much more sturdy than the front.

Both me and the guy that hit me have the same insurance company, they already have the claims setup, I have a rental car scheduled for lunch, and I hope this will be taken care of painlessly and fast. The only thing that worry me is my back…

Below you can see the front of my car. I was able to drive it to my work. You see the radiator fluid leaking out on the ground.