NOTES

NOTES – a.k.a. VAXNotes

“Notes” was a curse and a blessing to me. When I joined DEC in 1983, I was given the task of supporting the "DEC Professional", a bastardised PDP running a bastardised version of RSX called POS. No-one knew much about this box, so my complete lack of knowledge about it was no drawback. About a week after I joined, I phoned the support centre in Atlanta and spoke to a guy called Buck Trayser to ask some questions. He immediately redirected me to CTNOTES (CT being the code name for the Pro) and so an addiction was born.

CTNotes was originally just for the developers, but for information-starved support people, Notes was an ideal medium. VMSNotes was born shortly thereafter and every product had a Notesfile, culminating in tens of thousands of Notesfiles in DIGITAL as the paradigm was applied to personal interests of every imaginable variety.

Throughout the 1980's, I was a member of the thriving NOTErs community, using the tool for support of both the technical and personal variety. I made friends and enemies, debated existentialism and "DO Key=RETURN" (you had to be there) and, when I visited any DEC facility in the world (USA, Germany, France, Italy etc, - I was based in the UK), set up parties and meetings with friends and colleagues I had only ever met electronically. We were citizens of a culture, not of nations and as such we cleaved together despite differences in our ages, jobs and country.

Several transatlantic couples I knew met through NOTES and subsequently married (and at least two couples subsequently divorced - Notes wasn't a guarantee of lifelong partnership). My two sons were named after NOTErs I had become friendly with. In NOTES I made friends I still email and meet today. A visit in October 2000 to San Francisco was punctuated by one of many friendly meetings with Martin Minow, a NOTEr from my first day in CTNOTES.

I started several dozen Notesfiles - WHOAREYOU was for introductions, to prevent re-introductions every time you enterd a new notes conference. FRIENDS was to answer a plea that chit-chat be kept out of "serious" notesfiles. In all I started about 100, but kept ownership of only a very few.

One notesfile I did NOT start was SEXCETERA, which closed very rapidly after Topic 69 was reached, immediately entitled "Spit or Swallow". WOMANNOTES and MENNOTES debated gender-specific issues and had the first instances I was aware of, of one gender passed off as another. This had coincided with the advent of personal VAXstations such that users could invent their usernames and NOTE using different personas.

SOAPBOX was started by Simon Szeto to house "Flamers" for the same reason I introduced FRIENDS - to keep them out of technical notesfiles. Several generations came and went with some versions disappearing overnight due to "content problems". However, the debate was strong and forthright and you could test your mettle 24 hours a day, 7 days of every week of the year. SOAPBOX had hundreds of contributors, but most were fried into submission on their first few visits. It also generated the most complaints of any notesfile (mostly because it lasted longer than ones like SEXCETERA). As of May 2002, it’s still going.

The DIGITAL notes conference, housing rumours and facts alike, one had the hilarious sight of someone writing "No-one ever got fired for writing a Note" – and getting fired.

I remember the first NOTEr to "come out" as gay, followed by many others. A Gay notes conference was set up, of course, but he was the first to bravely step into the light in an "ordinary" notes conference.

My Managers were aghast at my NOTing, but the nature of the medium was that I could get technical support and advance information far faster than by conventional methods and they acquiesced to my NOTing.

The early versions of NOTES (written originally by Len Kawell) had no "address book" or concept of "last read", so I extracted all announcements from the EASYNOTES conference each week and added them to a VMS DCL procedure that was used throughout the world to keep track of where you had last gotten to when reading a notes file.

In the late 1980's, a meeting in "VMS Headquarters" - Spitbrook Road, Nashua, led to an attempt to "productise" Notes. This, in my opinion was the first step in the downward spiral. Although the meeting lead to NOTESv2 with an "address book", and Moderators having the right to change/delete offensive materials, it also put NOTES at the mercy of Product Management and worse, revenue-seekers. This eventually led to VAXNOTES (then renamed DECNOTES) being under funded officially, as opposed to overmanned with unofficial volunteers.

Notesv2 took off inside DEC, but the greater public never really understood its use. With the rise of UNIX and decline of VMS, many people moved to using NEWS, a far inferior medium, but as in BETAMAX vs. VHS, NEWS won because it was just more widely available and cheaper on the network.

With the layoffs in 1991-3, the death of Simon Szeto in June 1992 (he was the convener of the Notesv2 meeting and perhaps the most prominent NOTer), thep opularity waned. When last I was in a DEC/COMPAQ facility with access to notes, the 10,000-odd conferences had dwindled into history.

One side note of humour was that the noters often had "personal names", which, instead of being their name, were other thoughts such as "I'm pink, therefore I'm SPAM". In a moment of aberration, I wrote a piece of code that cycled through some favourite lyrics, including those to Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah-Bands' "Intro-Outro" and received an enraged and also puzzled mail from a vietnamese guy working for DEC asking why my "personal name" was "Ho Chi Minh on Triangle". Little did he realise that the previous note I had written had had "Roy Rogers on Trigger".

As you can see below, Notes has extended into the 21^st Century with a “Soapbox” conference still ongoing on a system external to HP. We hare having fun and games still, arguing over just about everything. Long may it continue!