Hotmail upgrades to 250MB and beyond
Many years ago, when I worked in evangelism at Apple Computer, I was visited by an ex-Apple employee who wanted me to help promote his new startup company, which had an idea for a web-based email system he called Hotmail. I looked at it but quickly dismissed it as another me-too idea, since I knew many other similar systems at the time. But it was fun to set up lots of new accounts, and I remember sending emails to friends from my accounts
billgates@hotmail.com and
BillClinton@hotmail.com. After a few laughs, I abandoned those accounts and started using a more serious one for myself, plus a new one I made for my wife and that's how I started with Hotmail.
Of course, within a year or two the company really took off and soon they were bought by Microsoft and the rest is history. But my wife and I still use the accounts I created back then, and were eagerly looking forward to the day when they get upgraded to 250MB and more, but it seems to have taken forever.
Well it turns out that when you manage a couple hundred million mailboxes the way Hotmail does, upgrading to that much memory is no easy feat. They have been upgrading several million new accounts every day and they're planning to have 40M upgraded by the end of November.
But the other interesting fact is that now Hotmail will be entirely hosted on Windows. For years, it was a dirty little secret that Hotmail was still using its ancient Unix infrastructure, the same technology it had when the founders first talked to me. Of course that hasn't been completely true for some time, but now the whole thing will be hosted on Windows 2003 Server and SQL Server 2000.
