At 15:21 9/27/95, Bill Stewart wrote:
Notes was a PC network reimplementation of PLATO, the system that also inspired notesfiles, a distant cousin of Netnews (though I'm not sure if netnews was originally inspired by PLATO or not...) Netnews assumes that articles are going to propagate for a while and then be trashed; notesfiles assumes you're building a knowledge bases that sticks around. (This transitoriness has allowed netnews to scale to its current N*100MB/day of trash :-)
Netnews was the old "msgs" program on serious steroids - the thing everyone was supposed to run in their .login (or .profile) scripts to get system-wide announcements. My bet is that msgs was inspired by the TOPS-20/ITS equivalents at MIT. Netnews subsequently underwent relatively rapid forced evolution in its early days to meet the scaling demands of the UUCP network, and the Internet of that time (~1983). The "notesfiles" system from UIUC that Rob Kolstad and Ray Essick wrote was not so much a distant cousin of NetNews as it was a similar system designed to solve the same problem (distributed message-based computer conferencing); I would argue that NetNews had the better transports and backends, but notesfiles was one or two up on NetNews in UI features (message threads, etc). The two were sufficiently close that (bad) gateways were written to move messages from one system to the other. With any luck, the next round of NetNews user interfaces will remove all of the UI advantages of notesfiles - the hooks have always been there, but writing good UI's hard work, and most NetNews hackers (me included) have had more fun/luck/interest in hacking the transport level to be ever more slightly efficient.
AT&T Network Notes is a joint AT&T/Lotus project that uses AT&T's public IPX network to support Notes on; I think it's now rolled out an accepting customers, but it was mostly in press-release stage while I was at AT&T.
I had the impression from what I read that this was going to be an IPX WAN, and that after announcing this Brave New Service, the partners discovered just how poorly IPX behaves on a WAN, and so have backed out to Notes on IP for this thing. I haven't heard much about it since, but I'd be surprised to find AT&T being foolish enough to try and operate an IPX WAN.
Notes does have encryption, using RSA and I think RC4; I'm not sure if they do the 40 bits exportable/ 128 domestic bit or just use 40 bits. Don't know about overflow kinds of bugs; the bugs I've heard about were more problems integrating with Cc:Mail :-)
Lotus is indeed one of RSA's licensees; I remember reading that in the WSJ at about the same time that Apple became one. I still place my message-based distributed collaboration bets on NetNews technology, or some obvious derivative of it. Erik Fair