Friday Fun: The Fascinating Story of Hotmail

Looking for a fun way to kill some time before you wrap it up ahead of the weekend? This might help.This YouTube video dives into the history of Hotmail, from how Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith came up with the idea for free webmail, to its explosive viral growth, and ultimately Microsoft's $400 million acquisition in 1997.What you perhaps did not know: After buying Hotmail, Microsoft discovered that one of its biggest internet services wasn't running on Windows at all! It was powered by Unix, FreeBSD, and Apache. What followed was a years-long engineering effort to migrate the platform onto Microsoft's own technology stack, complete with plenty of technical and operational challenges along the way.If you enjoy internet history, email history, or stories about the engineering decisions behind the services we take for granted today, I think you'll enjoy this.Happy Friday, and enjoy the trip back to the early days of webmail!