Ten Years?

Has it really been THAT long?  Well, I guess so.  From an article in Time:

Gmail's home page as it looked on March 31, 2004, shortly before the service launched

If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.

Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before: Here’s John Markoff of the New York Times reporting on it at the time. But the idea of the search kingpin doing email was still startling, and the alleged storage capacity of 1GB—500 times what Microsoft’s Hotmail offered—seemed downright implausible. So when Google issued a press release date-stamped April 1, an awful lot of people briefly took it to be a really good hoax. (Including me.)

Gmail turned out to be real, and revolutionary. And a decade’s worth of perspective only makes it look more momentous.

I remember when getting an invite to join Gmail was something of a quest for techies and techie wannabees... and they weren't that easy to get.

Once it was clear that Gmail was the real deal, the invitations became a hot property. The limited rollout had been born of necessity, but “it had a side effect,” says Harik. “Everyone wanted it even more. It was hailed as one of the best marketing decisions in tech history, but it was a little bit unintentional.”

Bidding for invites on eBay sent prices shooting up to $150 and beyond; sites such as Gmail Swap emerged to match up those with invites with those who desperately wanted them. Having a Hotmail or Yahoo Mail email address was slightly embarrassing; having a Gmail one meant that you were part of a club most people couldn’t get into.

I don't remember when I got my invite but it was well into Gmail's first year.  There isn't a way (that I can find) to easily get to the first message in my in-box or sent mail folders (which have 7,893 and 14,960 messages, respectively)... which would tell me how long I've had the app.  And that 1GB of free storage?  It's grown to 15GB, of which I have only used 15%.   We loves us our Gmail.

The Time article is fascinating.  Read it.