[asiachick]

Please don't repeat this non-fact. There were plenty of large SPAs before GMail. Oddpost existed 2 years before Gmail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost

It also felt more like an app than gmail ever has given it had the "standard" 3 panel look of most desktop email apps (same as most of them do today like Thunderbird/Outlook/Apple's Mail)

And before that Outlook had a browser version that acted like a SPA since 1997.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web

In fact I'm pretty sure that's why Microsoft introduced XMLHttpRequest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History

[airstrike]

Outlook Web Access is absolute horseshit compared to OG gmail. Sure, it was JS-driven, but it wasn't good.

The apps you mentioned had nowhere near the impact that Gmail had in terms of showing what was possible

[omegabravo]

GMail had a massive impact, but I didn't really think it was novel from a technical JS perspective. It was really basic, and loaded fast. It had excellent fast search and very good junk mail rejection.

Most email providers had approximately 100Mb mailbox limit (I can't remember specifically), but Gmail had 1Gb.

[city41]

To me it was Maps in 2005 that really showcased what JS could do.

[wolco]

It was novel to release gmail at that scale in javascript. It hasn't been done before. 1Gb was a crazy size.

Anybody remember gmail invites?

[wyclif]

I remember Gmail invites. Ironically, Evan Williams (formerly of Twitter, now of Medium, at the time working at Google after they bought Blogger) was the person who sent me mine—and on the morning of April 1st, 2004. So I've had a Gmail account since the first day it was publicly available.

[treebornfrog]

Yes, had one from an uncle.

I then realised that I could invite a second account, so I created a handful of accounts and still own them today.

Good times.

[airstrike]

I actually got an invite from Google because I was on blogger.com back then (sad to admit it...)

I probably could have picked [e-mail] were it not for the 6 letter minimum, so ended up with [e-mail] which still yields an absurd amount of messages meant to a variety of other recipients...

[Semaphor]

Sure, I bought one off ebay for 0.10€ :D

[chc]

I don't think many people knew about Oddpost, whatever it was, so it seems a bit suspect to say it influenced a lot of developers' perceptions of JavaScript.

[lowercased]

As someone who was doing web development at that time (since '96 actually), oddpost did have an impact on perception of JS and what was possible among developers. Yahoo buying them was kind of a big deal at the time, and every developer I knew who was involved in web stuff had seen it or at least heard about it.

The biggest drawback at the time was that it was window/IE only, and when gmail was released, google made an effort to be cross-platform.

IMO, Google's 'big win' wasn't so much showing what JS could do, but that complex JS could be done cross-browser and cross-platform.

[trustfundbaby]

Never heard of oddpost, and pretty sure most devs at the time had never either. I do remember Gmail really being a wow moment with respect to Javascript and specifically AJAX though.

[hamburglar]

As someone who was at Microsoft and had connections in the IE team, I can tell you that Oddpost influenced IE itself, in that the team considered it a pretty novel thing to do with the browser and actually had the Oddpost dev team up to Redmond to pick their brains about how the browser should support these types of apps.