Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online
Tom Evslin on Bill Gates, the birth of Exchange, and dragging Ma Bell onto the web
Tom Evslin drove the WorldNet project at AT&T and helped develop what became Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. He was at Microsoft when the company was still working out what to do about this newfangled internet thing.
Evslin describes himself as one of Microsoft's "internet radicals" in the early 1990s, when the company was developing Exchange Server to fend off the threat from Lotus Notes.
"Bill Gates was willing to put lots of effort and money into Exchange because he was very afraid of Lotus Notes," Evslin says. "He felt that Lotus Notes could become a platform the way that Windows was, which would be an enormous threat to Microsoft. And so he saw Exchange as a Notes killer."
Evslin saw Exchange differently "because I was an email guy." He and Microsoft's other "internet radicals"...
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