How free online storage got to be so ubiquitous [infographic]

Email-then-and-now-finalWhen it comes to online storage, we live in a time of plenty: Products like Google’s Chromebook Pixel offer 1 TB of online storage (enough to save 1,000 hours of video), while services like DropBox let us deposit huge files in the cloud for free, and most email providers offer virtually unlimited space.

It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way. Remember when you had to delete emails before receiving new ones? Back in the late ’90s, providers like Hotmail and Yahoo allowed users on a couple of megabytes—essentially, the size of a single song.

From Hotmail to Gmail to Dropbox, here’s a look back at some of the key moments in the evolution of free online storage.

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