Fun Fact: How Lotus Notes got it’s name
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from “The Lotus Position” or “Padmasana”. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
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FUN FACT 2:
Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet was codenamed “Bhudda” because it was intended to assume the Lotus position in the market (True)
That explains the company name. I have heard that “Notes” comes from Iris development (the original company which was purchased by Lotus) when they developed the first version of Notes. The design and data “notes” that composed the application contributed to the application’s name.
Actually the name “Notes” comes from “PLATO Notes”, a product released in 1970s by CERL.
The name “Domino” comes from all the Domino’s Pizza the team ate while developing R4.5 (Domino).
Following the Plato work at least two of the developers worked on VAX notes @ DEC, and then ended up at Iris/Lotus.
VAX notes suffered from the deadly design decision to make the connection among Notes nodes (forums/bulletin boards) and clients synchronous.
Lotus Notes instead used a well-engineered replication technology similar to (but much better architected, and implemented) Usenet News.