SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved to play pranks so much that soon after they founded their company more than a quarter-century ago, they began pitching outlandish ideas every April Fool’s Day. One year, Google posted a job posting for the Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company announced plans to introduce a “scratch and sniff” feature to its search engine.
The jokes were consistently so over-the-top that people learned to laugh at them as just another example of Google’s mischief. That’s why, on April Fool’s Day 20 years ago, Page and Brin decided to reveal something no one would have believed possible.
This was Gmail, a free service with 1 gigabyte of storage per account; This is an amount that seems almost pedestrian in the age of the one-terabyte iPhone. But at the time, this seemed like a mind-boggling amount of email capacity, enough to store around 13,500 emails before running out of space, compared to just 30 to 60 emails on the leading webmail services operated by Yahoo and Microsoft. This meant 250 to 500 times more email storage.
Besides the huge leap in storage, Gmail has also been equipped with Google’s search technology; so users were able to quickly retrieve a small piece of information from an old email, photo or other personal information stored on the service. It also automatically brought together a series of communications about the same topic, so everything flowed together as if it were a single conversation.
“The original pitch we put together was all about the three ‘S’s: storage, search and speed,” said Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive who helped design Gmail and other company products before becoming CEO of Yahoo.
It was such a mind-blowing concept that shortly after the Associated Press published a story about Gmail late on the afternoon of April Fool’s Day 2004, readers began calling and e-mailing the news agency to let them know the story had been spoofed by Google’s pranksters.
“That was part of the appeal of making a product that people wouldn’t believe was real. This changed people’s perception of the types of applications possible in a web browser, former Google engineer Paul Buchheit recalled in a recent AP interview about efforts to build Gmail.
It was three years in the making as part of a project called “Caribou,” a reference to the joke in the Dilbert comic strip. “There was some kind of absurdity in the name Caribou, it made me laugh,” said Buchheit, the 23rd employee hired at a company that now employs more than 180,000 people.
The AP knew Google wasn’t kidding about Gmail because an AP reporter was suddenly asked to come from San Francisco to the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters to see something that would make the trip worthwhile.
After arriving at a still-developing corporate campus that would soon be known as the “Googleplex,” the AP reporter was ushered into a small office where Page wore a devilish grin as he sat in front of his laptop.
Page, then just 31 years old, went on to show off Gmail’s stylishly designed inbox and show off how fast it ran in Microsoft’s now-defunct Explorer web browser. He also noted that there isn’t any delete button in the main control window, since there wouldn’t be a need for it considering Gmail has so much storage and is so easily searchable. “I think people will really like it,” Page said.
As with so many things, Page was right. Gmail now has an estimated 1.8 billion active accounts, and each now offers 15 gigabytes of free storage along with Google Photos and Google Drive. While that’s 15 times more storage than Gmail originally offered, it’s still not enough for many users who rarely see the need to clear their accounts, as Google hopes.
Digital hoarding of emails, photos, and other content is why Google, Apple, and other companies now make money by selling additional storage capacity in their data centers. (In Google’s case, it charges from $30 per year for 200 gigabytes of storage to $250 per year for 5 terabytes of storage). Gmail’s existence is also why other free email services and the internal email accounts employees use at work offer much more storage than they did 20 years ago.
“We were trying to change the way people thought because people had been operating in this model of storage scarcity for so long that deletion had become a default action,” Buchheit said.
While Gmail was the first building block in the expansion of Google’s internet empire beyond its still dominant search engine, it was also a game changer in many other ways.
After Gmail came Google Maps and Google Docs, along with word processing and spreadsheet applications. Then came the acquisition of video site YouTube, followed by the launch of the Chrome browser and the Android operating system that powers most of the world’s smartphones. With Gmail’s stated intention to scan the content of emails to better understand users’ interests, Google has also left little doubt that digital surveillance will be part of its expanding ambitions in its quest to sell more ads.
Although it gained instant traction, Gmail started out with a limited scope because Google initially only had enough computing capacity to support a small base of users.
“When we started, we only had 300 machines, and they were old machines that no one really wanted,” Buchheit said with a chuckle. “We only had enough capacity for 10,000 users, which is kind of ridiculous.”
But this scarcity has created an air of exclusivity in Gmail that fuels fervent demand for hard-to-find invitations to sign up. At one point, invitations to open a Gmail account were being sold on eBay for $250 each. “I hear people say, ‘Hey, I got a Gmail invite, do you want one too?'” Buchheit said. “It has turned into a kind of social currency,” he said.
Although signing up for Gmail has become increasingly easy as Google’s network of massive data centers come online, the company didn’t start accepting anyone who came to its email service until it opened the floodgates as a Valentine’s Day gift to the world in 2007.
A few weeks later, on April Fool’s Day in 2007, Google would announce a new feature called “Gmail Paper” that offered users the chance to print and send email archives to Google about “94% post-consumer organic soybean phlegm.” them through the Postal Service. Google was really kidding back then.