Hotmail
Email you could check from ANY browser, anywhere — revolutionary in 1996, when email lived inside your ISP's software. Your first email address was probably a Hotmail address with numbers in it. It still works. It just says outlook.com now.
Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched Hotmail on July 4, 1996 — one of the first free webmail services on the internet, alongside RocketMail. The pitch was genuinely radical: your email lived on the web, reachable from any computer with a browser. Before Hotmail, email was tethered to your ISP's client software, checked from one machine at home. Microsoft saw where that led and bought the company in December 1997 for a reported $400 million — a staggering sum for the era — folding it into MSN. Hotmail had more than 8.5 million subscribers at the acquisition and over 30 million active members by February 1999.
The early-2000s experience was distinctly Hotmail: a username with your birth year stuck on the end because the plain one was taken, an inbox of chain letters and MSN Messenger notifications, and storage so tiny you deleted old mail to make room — until Gmail's 2004 launch set off a storage war that turned megabytes into gigabytes across the industry. Microsoft cycled the name through its rebranding eras, too: MSN Hotmail, then Windows Live Hotmail in 2007.
In 2012 Microsoft began moving everyone to Outlook.com, and the transition wrapped in May 2013 with 400 million active users carried across. The Hotmail address you made at twelve still delivers mail — the inbox around it just stopped saying Hotmail. Some 90s internet institutions die; this one got absorbed.
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