If you have used the old MSN Messenger from Microsoft, it is very likely that the registration was made with an e-mail from Hotmail. The webmail service was quite popular at the turn of the millennium, especially when it was linked to Microsoft's messenger, but ended up losing a lot of space after the arrival of Gmail.
What many may not know is that Hotmail is much more important to the history of the internet than it seems at first glance. Without it, email probably wouldn't be the way it is today. In 1996, when Hotmail was launched, there were only paid emails that depended on operators and specific software. So users had to subscribe to a provider for their email, install a program to use it, and could only access messages from a specific server.
Hotmail launched a different concept: it was free and open to anyone. And, more than that, it could be accessed from anywhere in the world: with webmail, you just had to access the Hotmail website from any browser, enter your credentials and that's it - all your messages could be accessed regardless of which part of the planet you were.
The integration of services with MSN Messenger was important for maintaining the popularity of webmail, but little by little it ended up falling out of favor: without offering the same storage space as competitors, and an old-fashioned and confusing interface, Hotmail practically became a joke from of the second half of the last decade.
To try to change the image of the service, Microsoft relaunched Hotmail in 2012 under the name Outlook.. All old accounts support the service, but now a modern interface and advanced features.
O Technology Refugee prepared a special article on the whole story from the creation of Hotmail to the transformation into Outlook.. Check it out below:
o Sign in to your Hotmail account through Outlook.
Although the service has officially changed its name, it is still possible to access the Hotmail account through Outlook.. To do this, simply access the official Microsoft webmail website and, when entering the login credentials, just enter the address of your old Hotmail email and its password.
Doing this, you will go directly into your Hotmail account inbox, being able to access all messages stored in it. Remember that some old accounts may have been canceled by Microsoft due to lack of activity on the part of the user.
The history of Hotmail
The beginning
Unlike today, it was quite difficult to get an email account in the early 90's. The existing services were paid and not exactly simple. Users needed to hire an access provider and then install specific software to configure that email account.
While the Internet did not reach many people - access to it was quite restricted in the early years - that was not exactly a problem. But as more and more users gained access to the network, that needed to change.
But that changed in the mid-90s. Indian developer Sabeer Bhatia arrived in the United States in the late 80s, and over the next decade moved into unication technologies. Along with colleague Jack Smith, Bhatia wanted to create an email that could not be spied on by anyone and that could be accessed via the web.
The idea was good, but it took a while to put into practice. Bhatia and Smith started working on the e-mail service in 1995 and, the following year, after securing an investment of US$ 300, they managed to launch it. The chosen name was a joke HTML – the website programming language. Thus, they arrived at Hotmail, which was officially launched on the 4th of July, 1996.
1 million users in a few months, Hotmail made it clear that there was a huge demand for free accounts and email accessible anywhere that had not yet been tapped by the technology industry. Hotmail's success also caught the attention of giant companies, and one of them was ready to make a bid to acquire the service.
Pra for Microsoft, the peak of popularity and the fall
By accumulating a large number of users in a very short time, Hotmail began to attract the attention of technology giants, being seen as a promising internet startup when the worldwide network of computers began to gain popularity around the planet.
One of the companies that became interested in the service was Microsoft. After negotiating the creators of Hotmail, in December 1997 Bill Gates paid US$ 450 million for the company. It was, at the time, the largest acquisition by an internet startup.
Under Microsoft's care, Hotmail was incorporated into MSN services, and over the next few years it grew to become one of the largest webmail services in the world. To a large extent, Hotmail's success is also due to MSN Messenger, Microsoft's instant messaging service that was quite popular in the 2000s. Anyone who wanted to chat with friends needed to create a Microsoft account – and Hotmail's email was the answer. best way to achieve this.
And everything was going well in the history of Hotmail until 2004, when Google launched Gmail. The service's differential was the internal space - users had 1 GB to store e-mails. Hotmail offered a few megabytes, forcing users to delete old messages from time to time.
Gmail also stood out in terms of functionality and interface, and even though Hotmail ran after it to offer similar tools, it was too late: Gmail has become the most used email service in the world, and still maintains its high popularity today. .
Hotmail, on the other hand, came to be considered practically a joke in the mid-2000s and underwent a major transformation in 2012. At the time, it was renamed to Outlook. and all the old accounts migrated to the new service, which is considerably more modern than the old Hotmail and continues to receive news from Microsoft even today.
