Hotmail was an instant hit even with its 2MB storage limit, which is laughable by today's standards but it seemed pretty decent if not sufficient at the time. In retrospect, I can only imagine how many juvenile Hotmail addresses were created during this period. Those who signed up for an account were also free to come up with their own prefix, or the string of text before the symbol. The name was originally stylized as HoTMaiL in honor of HTML, the markup language used to make web pages.Īs one of the first webmail providers, Hotmail allowed users to access their inbox from anywhere in the world as long as they had an Internet connection. To put that timeline into perspective, Hotmail landed just one day after the movie Independence Day hit theaters. Hotmail launched shortly after on July 4, 1996, to symbolize freedom from ISP-based services. They scraped together $4,000 to build a prototype in 1995, which led to a $300,000 investment from venture capitalist Draper Fisher. The free email service was created by Stanford classmates Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia. The true elite would even have a GeoCities website, but that's another story for another day. At the time, there was no provider hotter than the aptly-named Hotmail.
Savvy Internet users that wanted to go the extra mile would forego the standard email address that was issued by your ISP in favor of a custom address from a third-party provider.
All you really needed to impress the masses was a spiffy electronic mail address, or email addy for short. It wasn't all that difficult to be perceived as a technology bigwig in the mid-90s.
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