Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were known for their favorite habit of pranking.
Very soon after starting their company, every April Fool’s Day they played a prank. For example, one year, Google posted a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon.
Another year, the company said it planned to launch a “scratch and sniff” feature in its search engine.
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The jokes were always over the top, people recognized them. That’s why the Google duo decided to reveal something on April Fool’s Day that no one would have thought possible 20 years ago.
It was Gmail. It was announced as a free service with 1 gigabyte of storage per account, a number that today in the age of 1 terabyte iPhones sounds laughable, but at the time it sounded like an absurd amount of email capacity, enough to store about 13,500 emails before running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails on the then leading webmail services managed by Yahoo and Microsoft!
In addition to the big leap in storage space, Gmail was also equipped with Google’s search technology so that users can quickly retrieve a piece of information from an old email, photo or other personal information stored on the service.
It also automatically linked a series of communications on the same topic, so everything flowed together as if it were a single conversation.
“Take down the post, it’s a hoax!”
It was so incredible that shortly after the Associated Press story about Gmail late on April Fool’s Day 2004, readers began calling and emailing to tell the news outlet that it had been tricked by Google pranksters, it said. the AP.
“That was part of the charm, creating a product that people won’t believe is real. It kind of changed people’s perceptions of the kinds of applications that were possible in a web browser,” former Google engineer Paul Buchheit recalled during a recent AP interview about his efforts to build the Gmail.
The AP knew Google wasn’t joking about Gmail because one of its reporters was called down from San Francisco to the company’s headquarters in California to see something that would make the trip worthwhile.
When he arrived, the AP reporter was ushered into a small office where Page sat in front of his computer with an almost cocky smile.
Page, then just 31, showed off Gmail’s sleekly designed inbox and demonstrated how fast it ran on Microsoft’s now-defunct Explorer web browser.
And he pointed out that there was no delete button in the main control window, because it wouldn’t be necessary, given that Gmail had so much storage and could be easily searched. “I think people are going to really like this,” Page predicted.
Gmail changed the game
The existence of Gmail is also why other free email services and the internal email accounts that workers use for their jobs offer far more storage than we could have imagined 20 years ago.
Gmail changed the game in many other ways, becoming the first building block in expanding Google’s Internet empire beyond its still-dominant search engine.
After Gmail came Google Maps and Google Docs with word processing and spreadsheet applications.
Then came the acquisition of YouTube, followed by the introduction of the Chrome browser and the Android operating system that powers most of the world’s smartphones.
Although it immediately generated buzz, Gmail started with a limited scope because Google initially only had enough computing power to support a small audience of users.
But that lack created an air of exclusivity around Gmail.
At one point, Gmail account invitations were selling for $250 each on eBay.
Although signing up for Gmail became increasingly easy as more of Google’s network of massive data centers came online, the company wasn’t accepting all visitors to the email service until it opened its doors as a Day of Remembrance gift. Valentine’s Day 2007.