At the time, the server was probably about 30 feet away, so network latency wasn't a big issue :) The article gets the timeline wrong though. This anecdote hap

At the time, the server was probably about 30 feet away, so network latency wasn't a big issue :) The article gets the timeline wrong though. This anecdote happened very early in the development of gmail -- it was rewritten several times between then and launch.