Today is April 1st, a day when the internet is full of pranks and mischief, but it also marks the anniversary of one of the biggest game-changers in tech history. On April 1st, 2004, Google launched Gmail.

Now, given the timing, a lot of people thought it was a joke. Google was known for doing April Fool's stunts, and back then, the idea of giving users 1 gigabyte of email storage for free seemed laughably generous. Most other email providers at the time were giving out just 2 to 4 megabytes. Who would ever need that much space? So naturally, people thought this had to be another prank. But it wasn't.

Gmail was real, and it changed everything. It made email fast, reliable, and accessible from anywhere. It gave us search, threading, archiving, spam filtering that actually worked, and so much more. It even introduced the now-infamous beta tag that stuck around for five years.

Funny how some of the biggest advances in tech start out with skepticism. People thought the internet itself was a fad. They feared computers would replace their jobs. They thought the Industrial Revolution would ruin society. Now, it's AI everyone is afraid of. This is just the next step in a long chain of change. The only real constant is change.

The key is to embrace it, not fear it.

If you want to read more about the Gmail launch check out this page.

To read about some of Google's more elaborate April Fool's jokes, check out this article.

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