[tialaramex]

The best April Fools are real but funny, like when GitHub announced SVN support. Ha ha, I don't need Subversion, oh it works... huh, well, I still don't need Subversion but thanks I guess.

April 1st would be a good time to do Winter's Day if we could pull that off (Winter's Day is a holiday from the Miracleman comics - to celebrate Winter Moran, Miracleman's daughter, by allowing children to run the world for one day per year. In the comic book Miraculous things are possible, so allowing young children to drive fire trucks and so on seems fine...). Maybe in low risk industries we could indulge more of this, so no five year olds driving fire trucks, but there are a lot of jobs adults do that kids wouldn't mess up too badly in a single day if we planned carefully to allow for that.

[bombcar]

Wasnt gmail announced on Apr 1st?

[CrazyStat]

Yes, and the 1 gigabyte of free storage was plausibly a prank at the time--hotmail at the time provided 2MB, for comparison.

[bombcar]

Amazing to think many emails don’t fit in 2mb anymore.

[dochtman]

They were trying to get out in front of the NYT breaking the news of GMail, see The Social Radars podcast episode with Paul Buchheit (https://www.thesocialradars.com/episodes, great episode).

[belter]

Maybe the joke should have mentioned Linus opinion of Subversion as the most pointless project ever, due to it's centralized nature, with Github moving to a decentralized model ;-)