VideoNotes

Just thought you folks might like to see this - it's another one of Lotus' before-the-leading-edge products.

A long time ago (in the early 1990s) someone in the Notes Companion Products division realized that video was going to be a Big Thing on computers. Proposals were scribed, software written and Lotus Video Notes was released into the land. This was a front-end client and back-end storage system that allowed video clips (in AVI format) to be embedded in Notes mail or other documents. When the embedded image was clicked upon, the client would launch, locate the video, download and play it on the screen.

Holy prehistoric YouTube, Batman!

Now, mind you, they were absolutely right - the ability to record, store and serve video is a major part of today's computing scene. The biggest problem was that this was not really supported in a meaningful way at the operating system level - all of the low-level code had to be manually loaded on each individual machine, along with the Video Notes client.

Recording video was just as difficult - requiring a video capture card, driver and software installation (unlike the USB mini-cameras around today).

And trust me, speaking as the hardware guy who got to make all this play nice none of it played nice out of the box.

This proved to be the death knell for the product - the setup required on each individual machine was simply too much work and too much of a strain on the late Pentium II machines that the product had to run upon.

It worked, and worked well when configured properly - it was just (like many Lotus products) a few years too far ahead of its time.

On loan from the Alan Richer Collection