This was an enjoyable read. Especially the idea of someone living and creating between eras resonates with me.

I've seen and played with Lotus but I'm too young to have worked in any environment where it was the primary communication tool.

Still, my take away from OP is that Ozzied strived for Lotus to be much more than an email client.

Lotus makes much more sense as an attempt to bring the collaborative features of a shared university computer system with email, chat, forums, shared documents and applications to an ordinary networked PC like environment.

Something bigger than a weird email client.

I'm guessing you are writing about Notes.

Lotus was the name of the company that initially made the 1-2-3 spreadsheet.