Google announced it Gmail 20 years ago, on April Fool’s Day, with a press release that many thought was… funny. Gmail was described at the time as “a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to 8 billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 email pages per user”.
The company’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were known for their pranks, and two decades ago, the idea of storing so much email seemed unthinkable. Gmail could store approx 13.500 emails before running out of space, compared to just 30 to 60 emails on then-leading Yahoo and Microsoft services. The idea was that users wouldn’t have to sort or delete messages, relying on the triple bottom line: search, storage and speed. The service was inspired by “a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services,” according to Page.
“He was complaining about the time he was spending sorting through messages or finding them,” she said, according to the 2004 press release. . So he asked, “Can’t you fix this?”