Gmail revolutionized email 20 years ago

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin love to pull pranks, so soon after they founded the company more than a quarter-century ago, they started pulling them out every April Fools’ Day. Introduce outlandish ideas. One year, Google posted a job opening at its Lunar Copernicus Research Center. Another year later, the company said it planned to launch a “crawl and sniff” feature on its search engine.

The jokes were always so over the top that people learned to laugh them off as just another example of Google’s shenanigans. That’s why Page and Brin decided to reveal something on April Fool’s Day 20 years ago that no one would have believed 20 years ago.

That’s Gmail, a free service with 1 GB of storage per account, a number that sounds almost paltry in the age of 1 TB iPhones. But that sounded like a ridiculous amount of email capacity at the time, enough to store about 13,500 emails before running out of space, compared with the then-leading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft that could only store 30 to 60 emails. This means 250 to 500 times more email storage space.

In addition to the leap in storage, Gmail is equipped with Google’s search technology so users can quickly retrieve tidbits from old emails, photos or other personal information stored on the service. It also automatically connects a series of communications about the same topic together, so everything flows together as if it were one conversation.

“Our initial pitch was all about the three ‘S’s – storage, search and speed,” said Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive who helped design Gmail before later becoming Yahoo’s chief executive and other company products.

It was such a puzzling concept that shortly after the Associated Press published a story about Gmail late on the afternoon of April Fool’s Day 2004, readers began calling and emailing the news agency to tell the news agency that they had been Googled. The prankster deceived.

“That was part of the charm, making something that people couldn’t believe. It changed people’s minds about the types of applications that were possible in a web browser,” former Google engineer Paul Buchheit recalled in a recent interview with The Associated Press. The effort that built Gmail.

It took three years to complete as part of a project called “Caribou” – a reference to a recurring joke in the Dilbert comics. “The name Caribou is kind of ridiculous and it just makes me laugh,” said Buchheit, the 23rd employee hired by a company that now employs more than 180,000 people.

The Associated Press knew Google wasn’t kidding about Gmail because an AP reporter was suddenly asked to come from San Francisco to the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to see what would make the trip worth the trip.

Arriving at the still-developing corporate campus that would soon become what would become the Googleplex, AP reporters were ushered into a small office where Page sat in front of a laptop with a mischievous grin on his face. .

Page, who was just 31 at the time, went on to show off Gmail’s beautifully designed inbox and how fast it ran in Microsoft’s now-retired Explorer web browser. He points out that there’s no delete button in the main control window because it’s not necessary given that Gmail has such a large storage space and is easily searchable. “I think people are really going to love this,” Page predicted.

As with so many other things, Page was right. Gmail, which currently has an estimated 1.8 billion active accounts, now offers 15 GB of free storage per account, bundled with Google Photos and Google Drive. While that’s 15 times more storage than what Gmail originally offered, it’s still not enough for many users who rarely see the need to clear their accounts, as Google hopes.

The digital hoarding of emails, photos and other content is why Google, Apple and other companies now make money by selling extra storage capacity in their data centers. (In Google’s case, prices range from $30 per year for 200 GB of storage to $250 per year for 5 TB of storage). Gmail’s existence is also why other free email services and the internal email accounts employees use at work offer much more storage space than was imagined 20 years ago.

“We’re trying to change the way people think, because people have been working in this storage-scarcity model for so long that deletion has become the default action,” Buchheit said.

Gmail changed the game in several other ways, while becoming the first cornerstone of Google’s Internet empire as it expanded into its still-dominant search engine.

After Gmail came Google Maps and Google Docs with word processing and spreadsheet applications. This was followed by the acquisition of the video site YouTube, followed by the launch of the Chrome browser and the Android operating system (which powers most smartphones around the world). With Gmail making clear its intention to scan email content to better understand users’ interests, Google has left little doubt that digital surveillance in order to sell more ads will be part of its ever-expanding ambitions.

Although Gmail was an immediate hit, its scope was limited at first because Google initially only had enough computing power to support a small group of users.

But that scarcity creates an air of exclusivity around Gmail, driving a frenzy of demand for the elusive invitation to sign up. There was a time when invitations to open a Gmail account sold on eBay for $250 each. “It becomes a little bit like a social currency, where people say, ‘Hey, I got a Gmail invitation, do you want one?'” Buchheit said.

Although signing up for Gmail became increasingly easier as more of Google’s massive network of data centers came online, the company didn’t start accepting everyone on the email service until it opened its doors to the world as a Valentine’s Day gift in 2007.