Amy's Robot

Lots of Email

Assuming that Google's Gmail idea is not an April Fool's joke, we could all have free email with up to a gigabyte of permanent storage space at our disposal -- enough for 500,000 pages of email. It raises questions like: (a) will people use it as a distribution system and upload archives of movies, mp3s, etc., into their accounts and then make their passwords public, and (b) how will they prevent people from signing up for multiple accounts, thereby taking more than their fair share of disk space.

Regardless of that, a reader on Slashdot recalls the good old days of 1994 when AOL quietly offered its users 40 gigabytes of storage space. Here's how it worked:

Each AOL account could have up to five screen names. Each screen name could have up to 550 e-mails in their Inbox. Each e-mail could have a maximum file attachment of 15MB. So...15MB times 550 is 8GB times 5 is about 40GB.

Although it seems like Gmail has to be a joke, it's being widely reported, including by the NYT's John Markoff.

categories: Technology
posted by adm at 1:31 AM | #