• Google's April Fool's Day joke

    From JAB@21:1/5 to All on Sun Mar 31 10:01:37 2024
    Gmail revolutionized email 20 years ago. People thought it was
    Google's April Fool's Day joke

    SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
    loved pulling pranks, so much so they began rolling outlandish ideas
    every April Fool's Day not long after starting their company more than
    a quarter century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for a
    Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company said
    it planned to roll out a "scratch and sniff" feature on its search
    engine.

    The jokes were so consistently over-the-top that people learned to
    laugh them off as another example of Google mischief. And that's why
    Page and Brin decided to unveil something no one would believe was
    possible 20 years ago on April Fool's Day.

    It was Gmail, a free service boasting 1 gigabyte of storage per
    account, an amount that sounds almost pedestrian in an age of
    one-terabyte iPhones. But it sounded like a preposterous amount of
    email capacity back then, enough to store about 13,500 emails before
    running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails in the
    then-leading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft. That
    translated into 250 to 500 times more email storage space.

    https://apnews.com/article/google-gmail-anniversary-email-web-application-8ca1601944845282ecbc87ac9c335a6e

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