I did use an Amiga, but not long enough to really get a feel for it.
Gmail was so much better than the competition — Hotmail and Rocketmail — that Microsoft thought it was an April Fool's joke and advertised that new Hotmail users would get something like a terabyte each.
It's disappointing that you deleted your post, because I hadn't heard of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_1604 before. The way that I heard the PDP-1 was significant was that it was something like 100 times the speed of any machine within a factor of 10 in price. But I can't source that in any detail. Is it possible that that statement was true but only until the 1604 came out in the same year?
Sorry, deleted my last post. Thought I was a bit snarkier than I usually am. :-)
I will say that I thought Yahoo was almost strictly better at Gmail launch, except one thing... storage. And Yahoo was actually reducing the size if I recall correctly.
I do use gmail now, although I still find the UI, on the web at least, to not be to my liking.
The 1604 was a great device, along with the PDP-1. The PDP was certainly smaller and cheaper (1/4 the price), but the CDC was faster. Both were among the first (maybe the first two?) transistorized computers.
