Gmail - something unimaginable on April Fool's Day 20 years ago

20 years ago today, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to announce something that no one believed possible.

That's Gmail, an outstanding free service with a storage capacity of 1 gigabyte for each account, an absurdly huge email storage capacity at the time, enough to store about 13,500 emails. , hundreds of times more than the ability to store only 30-60 emails in the leading email services at that time of Yahoo and Microsoft.

In addition to its large storage capacity, Gmail is also equipped with Google search technology so users can quickly find an old email, photo or other personal information stored on this service. Gmail also has the ability to automatically string together a series of emails with the same subject and organize them as a conversation.

At that time, Gmail was such a strange concept that immediately after the AP news agency reported on this software on the afternoon of April 1, 2004, readers began calling and sending emails to the court. I'm writing to inform you that this is just a joke by Google.

In the early days of its launch, although it immediately created a big buzz, Gmail began to show its limitations because initially Google only had enough computing power to support a small number of users. But it is this scarcity that creates the attraction of Gmail, stimulating very high demand for invitations to register accounts on this software. There was a time when invitations to open Gmail accounts were sold for $250/invitation on eBay.

From something that was once just an April Fools' Day joke, Gmail has become a "game changer" in the field of email services in many aspects, and at the same time it is also a building block. first laid the foundation for Google's expansion of the Internet system beyond its core search engine segment.

Gmail currently has an estimated 1.8 billion active accounts, each with 15 gigabytes of free storage along with photo sharing software Google Photos and file storage software Google Drive.

Although it has increased 15 times compared to the original capacity, this number is still not enough for many users. That's why Google, and other technology companies like Apple, are making money selling additional storage capacity in their data centers./.

Jessica Tanner

Update 01 April 2024