Happy 20th birthday to Gmail, the email client that changed our lives
Twenty years ago in 2004, I vaguely remember Google’s announcement of Gmail as a topic of conversation. Was it another of Google’s infamous April Fool’s pranks?
I was a young reporter, about a decade into covering the semiconductor industry. The internet wasn’t all that new; it had been around for about a decade. Ironically, I don’t remember how exactly we had been notified of Gmail’s launch. Was it via fax? Or our rudimentary Lotus 1-2-3 email? I can’t even remember if my publication, a business-to-business weekly chip magazine, even covered it.
But shortly thereafter, I was invited to try Gmail out for myself. And then I got it.
If I remember correctly, “mark@gmail.com” was available, but aliases had to be six letters long. I passed on “hachman@gmail.com,” thinking that no one would know who “Hachman” was. I settled on a more recognizable alias. But I offered my girlfriend at the time a beta signup, and she grabbed one of the coveted first-name email addresses. And those were a big deal — this wasn’t too far-removed from the dot-com rush, and Gmail aliases were being bought and sold on eBay.
So what made Gmail great? Search.
It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when an email came and went, and digging it up was like unearthing the Ark in an Indiana Jones movie. Printing out email wasn’t uncommon. Google had made a name for itself in search, and applying those search algorithms to email that you received even a few weeks ago saved tons of time. Even emailing something to yourself was a way to “remember” an important document, if you weren’t able to or didn’t want to save it as a Word or Notepad file.