[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.