Filipino Programmer | Philippines

In late 90’s web based email service has been increasingly popular. And one of the names that branded Webmail and made history is Hotmail. I still remember how popular Hotmail was, and how people able to communicate very easy and fast using email on browsers. Hotmail was first launched commercially on US Independence Day of 1996, representing the freedom from ISP’s. This was founded by two brilliant minds Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith on 1995. Smith had the idea of incorporating email on web browsers which basically promotes easy access anywhere from a computer. Sabeer came up with the business plan for the mail service and tried all kinds of names that ends with “-mail”. The final name was Hotmail because it included the letters HTML which is the mark up language used to write the base of web pages.

Hotmail was initially backed by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, Hotmail reported more than 8.5 million subscribers and was sold later that month to Microsoft for a reported US$400m, after which it was rebranded under the MSN umbrella.

By February 1999, Hotmail reported more than 30 million active members. Hotmail serves e-mail accounts in many countries, supporting 17 languages, and is still one of the largest webmail providers as of July 2005, with 35.5% world market share according to comScore Media Metrix data.

Hotmail was originally run on FreeBSD operating system.

Reference
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail

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