Google is that we can just release things internally and have this great population
of testers, essentially. So people inside have been using Gmail for a long
time. The code name was Caribou. Initially, I called it Gmail, and then we realized
that was not really very subtle, so we changed it to Caribou.
Livingston: Did you choose Caribou?
Buchheit: Yeah. There’s a Dilbert cartoon where he’s talking about “Project
Caribou,” and I thought it was a funny name, so I used it.
Livingston: Tell me about one of the darkest days of the project, when you felt
that you couldn’t do this. And tell me about one of the most euphoric days.
Buchheit: There are a variety of dimensions to the darkest days. Like I said, a
lot of times it was sort of controversial, especially in the very early days, because
people weren’t sure if we should even be doing this. So the general attitude
would swing, and when it would swing against us, that was very hard to deal
with. Later on, not as much.
We would have some system problems internally. In a previous generation,
it wasn’t as redundant as what we finally released, and the hard disk in one of
our machines that had everyone’s email stopped working. I came in and everyone
I walked past would ask me, “When is Caribou going to be back up?” I was
walking into the machine room with screwdrivers, and people saw me and were
like, “Oh no!”
I managed to take apart the hard drive and transplant the electronics from
another drive, so nothing was lost. Through the whole thing, we’ve never lost
any data, which is kind of unbelievable considering everything that happened.
A lot of the machines that Google is built on—commodity is the polite word for
them—they’re regular PCs and so they’re not always the most reliable.
The most fun was, of course, launching. Nothing is more exciting than
finally getting it out there for the world and seeing that people like it.
Livingston: Were there any disasters on launch day?
Buchheit: Nothing major. It went surprisingly smoothly. There are always little
problems but nothing so bad that I remember it. But then again, I’d been
awake for 70 hours at that point. I was awake for about 3 days, because I was
furiously assembling the last bits—sort of stitching together some systems to
actually make it public, like the login system. And just testing everything.
Livingston: Did you sleep well that night?
Buchheit: Strangely enough, when I went home, I had a hard time going to
sleep.
Livingston: Since Google was totally focused on search at the time, was there

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