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In this week's Throwback Thursday, we look at Gmail. Not Google's email, which has been with us since about 2003. I'm talking about Garfield mail.



According to this 2018 article at Gizmodo, Garfield email started sometime about 1997 and gave you access to not only an exclusive email at "catsrule.garfield.com" but also exclusive content on the garfield.com site. What's more, the article claims that at least in 2018, there were still people using that e-mail server. Keep in mind that really all you need to keep an email server going is a domain registration and a little bit of skill. Since Garfield is owned by Paramount Global, it would be very easy to have one of their many e-mail servers handle that small amount of traffic.

By the way, Garfield's surprising ownership by Paramount means that technically there is a nonzero chance that America's favorite lasagna-eating cat could actually show up in a Star Trek episode. Now, I don't know about you but I'd pay extra money to see how they pulled that specific thing off.

The zaniness of the internet in the 20th century

The internet itself was invented in 1969, but it wasn't until the 1990s that it became accessible to regular folks using a web browser. The internet back then was very different from what it's become today. Younger folks may not even be able to understand this, but in the 1990s the internet was seen as a beacon of hope. It was going to be the place where we all came together in peace and harmony and shared all our information for free. Yeah, that didn't exactly work out as promised.

This is a perfect example, if you ask me, of the fact that until the mid-2000s we really didn't have any idea what to do with the internet. E-commerce itself didn't really start to get hot until then, and really while there were search engines before Google obviously they weren't anywhere near as good. So, we literally went to books to find out what web sites to visit and since most of us had internet connections but nothing productive to use them for, naturally sites like this took advantage of our desire to waste time.

In truth, it did waste a lot of time. Keep in mind when "Garfield's G-Mail" launched around 1997, practically everyone on the internet was using dial-up. I remember having to wait 2 whole minutes for a web site to load. Of course by that time not only did I not even want what was on the site, I probably forgot what it was.

2004: the real Gmail

Google's own free webmail service launched in 2004. It had been around in beta, I recall, for about 6 months before that. You actually needed an invitation from an existing user and that user only had a small number of invitations.

Back then, Google was new and exciting and we all thought it was going to be amazing. Even so, I don't think anyone had any idea how big Google would become by the beginning of the 2010s. Today Google is practically synonymous with internet access, and most of us couldn't imagine being online without it.

Check out the original "G-mail"

If you're still into wasting time, check out the original g-mail site at archive.org. Archive.org, also known as The Internet Archive, is where pretty much every embarrassing web site eventually goes to die. The Internet Archive's copy of the page is very incomplete, for several reasons. A lot of the content on it may have originally been in Flash, which has mercifully died. Most of the images are missing. But, you can still get something of an idea of what it might have looked like. Now imagine waiting 2 minutes for that page to load. That, friends, is the spirit of the internet in the 20th century.

The post THROWBACK THURSDAY: The original G-Mail: Not what you think appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.

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