April fools prank8/17/2023 ![]() In an effort to alleviate these irritations, web designers started implementing tags within pages that could allow selected elements to be loaded asynchronously without disturbing the rest of the page. Reloading a page meant painstakingly downloading the entire content over the available connections of the day. Traditionally, webpages built with HTML required the browser to download the entire page from the web server in order to display any changes. In addition to the storage space and search tools, another selling point of the new webmail service was its implementation of a new approach to website coding. ![]() A product that served their needs now would suit a future clientele. Google’s staff were such heavy users of email, they figured they were pioneers of an email culture that would eventually catch up with them. The engineers who worked with Buchheit on turning his personal pet into a commercial product used themselves as test cases. The decision to allow such storage volume would give runway for the search tools to show off what they could do for productivity. Google offered Gmail users a full gigabyte of storage-hundreds of times more data than even the top competitor. The search function gained value the more there was to search. Maximizing the value of searching email went hand in hand with allowing email boxes to swell with content. Although some voices in the company were wary of straying from Google’s core product-its web search engine-those fears were allayed by thinking of Gmail as a new application for search tools. When Google decided to develop a commercial webmail service, Buchheit’s project served as a prototype. A key feature of Buchheit’s personal webmail was its search engine, which facilitated random access to old communications based on keywords. In the late 1990s, Buchheit developed a web-based email service for his own use, run from a server that sat on his desk. Gmail had its roots in a personal project by engineer Paul Buchheit. At the start of the twenty-first century, even the most generous webmail providers capped usage at a mere handful of megabytes, obliging users to spend valuable time curating their accounts to prune unneeded messages. But this transition was slowed by early limitations in the way webmail could operate, including storage caps, clunky interfaces, and unfriendly designs. Hotmail and other webmail services that emerged in its wake offered an important pivot away from something rooted to an installed software client, and toward the freedom of being able to communicate from any web browser. By 1996 the public had access to Hotmail (whose name was derived from an effort to pronounce “HTML”). The first webmail client was developed at CERN in 1994. This shift occurred in part as internet connectivity itself expanded from specialty access to mass acceptance, but the advent of webmail as a preferred form of email access was a critical step. The transition from email as a specialized service used by a select group of people under certain circumstances to a ubiquitous form of communication used by the masses took decades. The ability to communicate through “electronic mail” had existed since the 1970s. The announcement promised an unprecedented set of features, including a then-staggering gigabyte of storage coupled with full-text searchability.Īs we now know, of course, this was no joke, and it heralded a significant transformation in email accessibility and usage. The news release seemed unusually casually written and coincided with ridiculous job postings for a research and development site Google allegedly planned to open on the Moon. Google’s April 1, 2004, announcement of a new webmail service was widely construed at the time as a facetious joke. In later interviews, Sergey Brin said the best form of an April Fools’ prank would be to debut something that sounded so crazy it had to be a joke, and then let it sink in that the service was real and here to stay. Google’s reputation for April Fools’ Day jokes inclined many to assume the 2004 announcement of Gmail was yet another gag.
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