Nowadays, pc customers take collaboration software program with no consideration. Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, and so forth, are such a giant a part of many individuals’s every day lives that they hardly discover them. However they’re the outgrowth of years of onerous work carried out earlier than the Web grew to become a factor, when there was a thorny drawback: How may folks collaborate successfully when everybody’s utilizing a stand-alone private pc?
The reply was groupware, an early time period for collaboration software program designed to work throughout a number of computer systems hooked up to a community. At first, these computer systems had been situated in the identical workplace, however the vary of operation slowly expanded from there, forming the extremely collaborative networked world of immediately. This submit will hint a few of this historical past, ranging from
early ideas formed at Stanford Research Institute by the group of famed pc pioneer Douglas Engelbart, to a smaller firm, Lotus, that hit the market with its groupware program, Notes, on the proper time, to Microsoft’s ill-fated attempt to enter the groupware market, together with
never before seen footage of Bill Gates on Broadway.
Within the early days of the computing period, when IBM’s PC reigned supreme, collaboration was troublesome. Ross Anthony Willis/Fairfax Media/Getty Pictures
How the PC made us neglect about collaboration for some time
Think about that it’s the early-to-mid-Nineteen Eighties and that you simply run a big firm. You’ve invested some huge cash into private computer systems, which your workers are actually utilizing—IBM PCs, Apple Macintoshes, clones, and the like. There’s only one drawback: You might have a bunch of computer systems, however they don’t speak to 1 one other.
When you’re in a small workplace and must share a file, it’s no massive deal: You may simply hand a floppy disk off to somebody on the opposite aspect of the room. However what when you’re a part of an enterprise firm and the particular person it’s essential collaborate with is on the opposite aspect of the nation? Passing your colleague a disk doesn’t work.
The brand new personal-computing applied sciences clearly wanted to do extra to foster collaboration. They wanted to have the ability to take enter from a big group of individuals inside an workplace, to permit recordsdata to be shared and distributed, and to let a number of customers tweak and mash info with everybody having the ability to log out on the ultimate model.
The {hardware} that will allow such collaboration software program, or “groupware” because it tended to be referred to as early on, assorted by period. Within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, it was often a mainframe-to-terminal setup, moderately than one thing utilizing PCs. Later, within the Nineteen Eighties, it was both a
token ring or Ethernet community, which had been competing local-networking applied sciences. However whatever the {hardware} used for networking, the software program for collaboration wanted to be developed.
Stanford Analysis Institute engineer Douglas Engelbart is sometimes called “the daddy of groupware.”Getty Pictures
A number of the fundamental concepts behind groupware
were first forged on the Stanford Analysis Institute by a Douglas Engelbart–led group, within the Nineteen Sixties, engaged on what they referred to as an oN-Line System (NLS). An early model of NLS was introduced in 1968 throughout what grew to become often known as the “Mother of All Demos.” It was primarily a coming-out celebration for a lot of computing improvements that will ultimately grow to be commonplace. You probably have 90 minutes and wish to see one thing 20-plus years forward of its time, watch this video.
Within the years that adopted, on prime of well-known improvements just like the mouse, Engelbart’s group developed instruments that anticipated groupware, together with an “information center,” an early precursor of the server in a client-server architecture, and tracking edits made to text files by different people, an early precursor of version control.
By the late Nineteen Eighties, at a degree when the PC had begun to dominate the office, Engelbart was much less impressed with what had been gained than with what had been misplaced within the course of. He
wrote (with Harvey Lehtman) in Byte magazine in 1988:
The emergence of the non-public pc as a significant presence within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties led to large will increase in private productiveness and creativity. It additionally precipitated setbacks within the growth of instruments aimed toward rising organizational effectiveness—instruments developed on the older time-sharing methods.
To some extent, the non-public pc was a response to the overloaded and irritating time-sharing methods of the day. In emphasizing the facility of the person, the non-public pc revolution turned its again on these instruments that led to the empowering of each co-located and distributed work teams collaborating concurrently and over time on widespread data work.
The introduction of local- and wide-area networks into the non-public pc atmosphere and the event of mail methods are main towards among the instructions explored on the sooner methods. Nevertheless, among the experiences of these earlier pioneering methods needs to be thought-about anew in evolving newer collaborative environments.
Groupware comes of age
Groupware lastly began to catch on within the late Nineteen Eighties, with tech corporations placing appreciable assets into creating collaboration software program—maybe taken in by the thought of “orchestrating work groups,” as
an Infoworld piece characterized the challenge in 1988. The San Francisco Examiner reported, for instance, that Basic Motors had invested within the know-how, and was starting to require its suppliers to just accept buy orders electronically.
Specializing in collaboration software program was a good way for unbiased software program corporations to face out, this being an space that giant corporations—Microsoft specifically—had principally ignored. Right now, Microsoft is the 800-pound gorilla of collaboration software program, due to its mixture of Teams and Office 365. Nevertheless it took the tech big a really lengthy whereas to get there: Microsoft began taking the market seriously only around 1992.
One firm specifically was well-positioned to reap the benefits of the opening that existed within the Nineteen Eighties. That was the
Lotus Development Corporation, a Cambridge, Mass.–primarily based software program firm that made its identify with its Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program for IBM PCs.
Lotus didn’t invent groupware or coin the phrase—on prime of Engelbart’s formative work at Stanford, the time period
had been around for years earlier than Lotus Notes got here on the scene. Nevertheless it was the corporate that introduced collaboration software program to everybody’s consideration.
Ray Ozzie [left] was primarily answerable for the event of Lotus Notes, the primary common groupware resolution.
Left: Ann E. Yow-Dyson/Getty Pictures; Proper: James Keyser/Getty Pictures
The particular person most related to the event of Notes was
Ray Ozzie, who was recruited to Lotus after spending time engaged on VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program. Ozzie primarily constructed out what grew to become Notes whereas working at Iris Associates, a direct offshoot of Lotus that Ozzie based to develop the Notes application. After some years of growth in stealth mode, the product was launched in 1989.
Ozzie defined his inspiration for Notes to Jessica Livingston, who described this historical past in her guide,
Founders At Work:
In Notes, it was (and that is onerous to think about as a result of it was a distinct time) the idea that we’d all be utilizing computer systems on our desktops, and subsequently we would wish to use them as communication instruments. This was a time when PCs had been simply rising as spreadsheet instruments and phrase processing replacements, nonetheless out there solely on a subset of desks, and undoubtedly no networks. It was ’82 after I wrote the specs for it. It had been primarily based on a system referred to as PLATO [Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations] that I’d been uncovered to at school, which was a large-scale interactive system that folks did studying and interactive gaming on, and issues like that. It gave us just a little little bit of a peek on the future—what it will be like if all of us had entry to interactive methods and know-how.
Constructing an software primarily based on PLATO turned out to be the appropriate concept on the proper time, and it gave Lotus an edge out there. Notes included electronic mail, a calendaring and scheduling software, an handle guide, a shared database, and programming capabilities, all in a single front-end software.
Lotus Notes on Laptop Chronicles Fall 1989
As an all-in-one platform constructed for scale, Notes
gained a strong reputation as an early instance of what immediately can be referred to as a business-transformation software, one which managed many parts of collaboration. It was complicated from an IT standpoint and required a major funding to take care of. In a manner, what Notes did that was maybe most groundbreaking was that it helped flip PCs into one thing that giant corporations may readily use.
As Fortune noted in 1994, Lotus had an enormous lead within the groupware area, partly as a result of the software program labored primarily the identical wherever in an organization’s community. We take that with no consideration now, however again then it was thought-about magical:
Like Lotus 1-2-3, Notes is simple to customise. A gross sales group, as an example, would possibly use it to arrange an digital bulletin board that lets folks pool details about potential shoppers. If among the information is confidential, it may be restricted so not everybody can name it up.
Notes makes such homegrown functions and the information they comprise accessible all through a company. The digital bulletin board you seek the advice of in Singapore is equivalent to the one your counterparts see in Sioux Metropolis, Iowa. The important thing to this universality is a process referred to as replication, by which Notes copies info from pc to pc all through the community. You would possibly say Ozzie discovered methods to make the machines telepathic—every is aware of what the others are considering.
This text reported that round 4,000 main corporations had bought Notes, together with
Chase Manhattan, Compaq Computer, Delta Air Lines, Fluor, General Motors, Harley-Davidson, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, J.P. Morgan, Nynex, Sybase, and 3M. Whereas it wasn’t dominant in the way in which Home windows was, its momentum was onerous to disregard.
A 1996 business for Notes highlighted its use by FedEx. Different commercials would use the humorist Denis Leary or be extremely conceptual. Not often, if ever, would these tv commercials present the software program.
Within the mid-1990’s, it was widespread for magazines to publish tales about how Notes reshaped companies massive and small.
A 1996 Inc. piece, for instance, described how a natural-foods firm efficiently produced a brand new product in simply eight months, a feat the corporate immediately credited to Notes.
“It’s grow to be our normal supervisor,” Groveland Buying and selling Co. president Steve McDonnell recalled.
Notes wasn’t low cost (InfoWorld lists the worth circa 1990 as US $62,000), and it was difficult to handle. However the optimistic outcomes it enabled had been immensely onerous to disregard. IBM seen and ended up shopping for Lotus in 1995, almost entirely to get ahold of Notes. Even earlier, Microsoft had realized that workplace collaboration was a giant deal, they usually wished in.
Microsoft jumps on the groupware bandwagon
Microsoft’s first foray into collaboration software program was its 1992 launch of Home windows for Workgroups. Regardless of nice efforts to advertise the discharge, the software program was not a business success. Daltrois/Flickr
Microsoft had excessive hopes for
Windows for Workgroups, the networking-focused variant of its common Windows 3.1 software program suite. To create buzz for it, the corporate pulled out all of the stops. Significantly.
Within the fall of 1992, Microsoft
paid something like $2 million to placed on a Broadway manufacturing with Invoice Gates actually heart stage, at New York Metropolis’s Gershwin Theater, one of many largest on Broadway. It was a wild present, and but, one way or the other, there isn’t a video of this occasion at the moment posted on-line—till now. The one particular person I do know of who has a video recording of this extravaganza is, fittingly sufficient, Ray Ozzie, the groupware guru and Notes inventor. Ozzie later served as a prime govt at Microsoft, famously changing Invoice Gates as Chief Software program Architect within the mid-2000s, and he has shared this video with us for this submit:
The 1992 one-day occasion was not a success. Watch to see why. (Courtesy of Ray Ozzie and the Microsoft Company)
00:00 Opening quantity
02:23 “My VGA can hardly wait on your CPU to reciprocate”
05:17 Invoice Gates enters the stage
27:55 “Prepare, get set” musical quantity
31:50 Bit with Mike Appe, Microsoft VP of gross sales
58:30 Invoice Gates does leaping jacks
A 1992 Washington Post article describes the efficiency, which concerned dozens of actors, a few of whom had been dressed just like the Blues Brothers. At one level, Gates did leaping jacks. Gates himself later said, “That was so dangerous, I assumed [then Microsoft CEO] Ballmer was going to retch.” For individuals who don’t have an additional hour to spend, here’s a abstract:
To get a style of the present, watch this information phase from channel 4.
Courtesy of Microsoft Company Archives
Regardless of all the trouble to generate fanfare, Home windows for Workgroups was
not a hit. Whereas Home windows 3.1 was dominant, Microsoft had constructed a program that didn’t appear to seize the burgeoning curiosity in collaborative work in an actual manner. Amongst different issues, it didn’t initially assist the TCP/IP networking protocol, even supposing it was the networking know-how that was successful the market and enabled the rise of the Web.
In its authentic model, Home windows for Workgroups carried such a unfavourable popularity in Microsoft’s personal headquarters that the corporate nicknamed it
Windows for Warehouses, referring to the corporate’s largely unsold stock, in line with Microsoft’s personal professional on firm lore, Raymond Chen.
Unsuccessful because it was, the truth that it existed within the first place hinted at Microsoft’s normal acknowledgement that maybe this networking factor was going to catch on with its customers.
Launched in late 1992, a number of months after Home windows 3.1 itself, the product was Microsoft’s
first attempt at integrated networking in a Home windows bundle. The software program enabled file-sharing throughout servers, printer sharing, and electronic mail—desk stakes within the modern-day however on the time a giant deal.
This video presents a really correct view of what it was like to make use of Home windows in 1994.
Sadly, it was a giant deal that got here a number of years late. Microsoft itself was
so lukewarm on the product that the corporate needed to replace it to Home windows for Workgroups 3.11 only a yr later, whose marquee function wasn’t improved community assist however increased disk speed. Confusingly, the corporate had simply launched Home windows NT by this level, a program that higher matched the wants of enterprise clients.
The work group terminology Microsoft launched with Home windows for Workgroups caught round, although, and it’s really
used in Windows to at the present time.
In 2024, group-oriented software program feels just like the default paradigm, with single-user apps being the anomaly. Over time, groupware grew to become so pervasive that folks now not consider it as groupware, although there are many massive, hefty, groupware-like instruments on the market, like
Salesforce. Now, it’s simply software program. However nobody ought to neglect the lengthy historical past of collaboration software program or its ongoing worth. It’s what acquired most of us by means of the pandemic, even when we by no means used the phrase “groupware” to explain it.
