> While many users would at first glance conclude that the "arrow" on the topmost button is an indicator that this is the currently selected button, it is used to indicate that this is a "special" (a.k.a. inconsistent and undesirable) type of button. Clicking on the arrow causes the button to "open" (downward) to reveal a variety of folders. Why the designers chose to use an arrow pointing to the right to indicate downward movement is one of the many mysteries of this program.

And now the expand/collapse UI pattern with right/down arrows or triangles is standard (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...). Don't get me wrong, the example button is terrible UI, but an interesting example of how norms change.

On more than one occasion I have misinterpreted the upvote icon on HN to be "collapse thread".

An IBMer once explained to me that Lotus Notes was intentionally not improved; it was purposefully bad, a form of coordinated sabatoge. The bugs provided employees with an excuse for why troublesome directives or wasteful meetings were lost.

To this day, I still am unsure if they were joking.

Hah, that’s great. Maybe there’s still saboteurs inside still fighting the (good?) fight:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/30/ibm_email_outage/

The "Enter Password" at the bottom of that page is simply great.

So without defending Lotus Notes in any way, there was a meaning to the symbols: they were defined by some oneway function from what you were typing. So you would get used to the little symbol dance, and know if and when you’d mistyped

Wouldn't it also allow any onlookers, if they are able to memorize the symbol dance, to derive your password one character at a time by trial and error?

No because it also depended on your computer . I remember when you switched computers it would change

I seem to recall the password was client-side too. So if you had Lotus Notes in a VM and you restored from a save point you needed to remember what your password was when you did the save.

Currently used at my workplace.

A day never goes by without a delight.

Edit: IBM Notes

What the heck! What were these “designers” having when they made that monstrosity? Hahaha.

The "too many windows, you need to close one before opening another" message is also present in current versions of Adobe Acrobat.

as an ex-IBMer, tragically yes...