Paul Buchheit has more details in his Founders at Work interview, but basically the first version of GMail was a Perl script that grabbed his e-mail inbox and stuffed it into the Groups indexing engine, so that other people could search his e-mail. Version 2 was to let it search over their inbox instead of his, and Version 3 added the ability to send e-mail.
So it wasn't a "prototype of Gmail" so much as a hack that got people starting to think about storing mail on google technology stack.
It's really funny, that this is the story of the the beginning of Gmail, when the part of Gmail that caught the whole world's attention was the AJAX web UI. I had always assumed Bucheit was a DHTML whiz. Storing and indexing mail already was rather old hat.
Wait, is this a part of Gmail? "other people could search his e-mail." o_O
>So it wasn't a "prototype of Gmail" so much as a hack that got people starting to think about storing mail on google technology stack.
That's the very definition of a prototype. Prototype != early version of a product. For one, it's often written in another stack, to make it easier to iterate. Second, it's more often than not, thrown away on the road to the actual product code.
>Wait, is this a part of Gmail? "other people could search his e-mail." o_O
Well, maybe not people, but their Ad serving service can surely search your email.
I agree it's funny - for me at least, the search is the least interesting part of gmail. The search is crap. Which is to say, it is just as crappy as the search in all the desktop clients or other mail services I've used.
