16 ms·

And it was productized before then. AOL being a huge one ("You've got mail"), and Hotmail also coming to mind.

• _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  And email was around long before AOL or Hotmail.
  • adventured 8y ago
    And nobody used it, relatively speaking vs the extraordinary scale that those email products made possible later. Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.
    • toadworrier 8y ago
      How many people used any internet technology before there was even in Internet? But some people did use email.
    • johnchristopher 8y ago
      Great point. Webmail is a product that was massively adopted compared to regular clients.
      • _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
        Perhaps, but no particular web implementation of email really stands out. (You might say Gmail, Gmail is really comparatively recent.) So a web interface on email push adoption further.