On: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting p...

[quickthrower2]

I wonder… why would an email system make their eyes light up? Must have been more to it than that

[jaywalk → quickthrower2]

If you never had an @hotmail.com email address, you're probably too young to understand what a big deal web-based email was back then.

[quickthrower2 → jaywalk]

I had one. My point is that was the finished thing. And it’s appeal to me was that it was free not that it was web based. Freeness required a VC. Was making web based email (if that era standard) a real hard technical challenge that only one dev team could do it?

[wizofaus → quickthrower2]

I'd been building increasingly sophisticated CGI-based web apps at the time (as a hobby) and still remember being blown away with what appeared to be a fully functional email client running inside Netscape. This was before Javascript was commonly available or standardized, and certainly no XmlHttpRequest etc.

[badcppdev → quickthrower2]

How well do you remember 4th July 1996? The internet was a very different place.