> Gmail was a web only email client released in 2004 Well, Gmail was actually one of the last web based email clients people used :-) Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and

> Gmail was a web only email client released in 2004 Well, Gmail was actually one of the last web based email clients people used :-) Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and so many others predate Gmail by years. > Web browsing was very much one of the "killer" apps for computers by the 2000s. One of them. People still used non-browser apps for all kinds of things: Media consumption (people didn't watch movies on Youtube), Office (Google Docs was very much a niche thing for many years), photo-editing (lots of pirated versions of Photoshop/Lightroom years after the iPhone release), etc. Most non-mail, non-social media, non-shopping stuff people do on the web these days was a dedicated SW from the vendor in those days. Want to make a photobook? Download this Windows binary and set it up there. It will then communicate with the server for the order (no browser utilized). > at the risk of aging myself - I was born in '89, and I literally do not remember a time where we didn't have DSL speeds and above (friends houses often still had dial-up until ~2005, though). Spring chicken! My first online experience was on a 340 baud modem :-)