[vwcx]

I find younger generations fascinated when I explain how Gmail was "invite-only" in its early years. Some of my earliest archived emails are conversations with random forum friends who I provided with one of my six allotted invites.

[burntsushi]

Yeah my story is that I paid ~$10 for my invite on ebay. Wild.

[bdw5204]

My brother somehow got a Gmail invite early on and then we ended up with effectively infinite invites by inviting ourselves whenever we needed more of them. They were useful for contests on his small forum because everybody wanted effectively infinite email storage.

I don't even remember most of the usernames anymore but I probably had a dozen or so Gmail accounts back in the 00s.