Oleg Zabluda's blog
Friday, April 27, 2012
 
Rumors about Google Drive (gDrive) were going on for years before Dropbox was released in Sep 2008.
Rumors about Google Drive (gDrive) were going on for years before Dropbox was released in Sep 2008.

GmailFS from Sep 13, 2004 (http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/2947) was a Linux FUSE userland mountable Linux filesystem, using gMail for storage. It was ported to WIndows in Oct 2005 (http://gadgetopia.com/post/3109). At the time gMail (first released Mar-Jun 2004) was providing massive, unbelievable and jawdropping 1GB of total storage [1], and 10MB individual attachments :-) This forced Yahoo Mail to increase total storage from 4MB to a whooping 100MB.

The name was used for the first time when gDrive 0.6 came out on Feb 12, 2005. It was a set of PHP scripts to store files your gMail account (http://www.puremango.co.uk/2005/02/gdrive_109/).

It was clear for a long time that sooner or later Dropbox will have to compete with gDrive from Google, as well as everybody else in the online storage space. Public statements from Dropbox always stressed not the storage per se, but viral marketing, self-described awesome clients for all platforms, etc... I was always somewhat puzzled why they don't provide other backend storage (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, ...) as an option, but hey what do I know. Now that the real gDrive is finally out, we'll see if their clients really are that awesome, especially if third-party backends will now be supported.

[1] People actually had hard time believing it at the time, but experiments confirmed it.
http://www.puremango.co.uk/2005/02/gdrive_109/

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