In 1987, when I joined Digital, its mail ALL-IN-1 had about eight million users world-wide. ALL-IN-1 had full-text word processing and shared calendar (for resources such as conference rooms, demo rooms, etc.) that would also make people's time easier to schedule and keep track of. File exchanges for all the word-processing documents of the age, attachments, e-mail lists, and gateways to various other mail systems (IBM and the standards of the day).

Alas, ALL-IN-1 ran on OpenVMS clusters (who would want a redundant e-mail system anyway) and its client/server frontend teamlinks are still around. Despite all its technological prowess and PC integration, however, Digital chose a new mail system in 1996. Abandoning its ALL-IN-1 roots, DEC chose a hearty mail system a mail system that could send word processing documents, pictures, video, and other binaries in e-mail, just like every other 20-year-old e-mail system.

The new e-mail system had the added advantage of being able to run on a Windows NT operating system, which, in 1996, everyone knew was the only system platform that would survive after the Y2K.

Microsoft Exchange was a lot more expensive than using Open Source, standards-based e-mail, but then again, Microsoft had much better marketing. The rest was history until people began to realize that Exchange costs lots of money to install and maintain and Open Source products tend to be free!