Meet the ‘internet radical’ who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online
Tom Evslin, an early Microsoft "internet radical," has recounted his role in developing what became Exchange Server and Outlook, and later in building AT&T's internet strategy through the WorldNet project. At Microsoft in the early 1990s, Evslin pushed for the company to embrace the internet sooner, but Bill Gates prioritised launching Exchange, Office and NT on schedule to counter the threat from Lotus Notes, planning to address internet integration afterwards. The account matters as a window into how two of the era's biggest tech firms were caught off guard by the internet's rapid rise despite having engineers already relying on it internally.
Evslin, who built Exchange's mail gateways, noted that an under-resourced SMTP gateway saw a surge in demand as more email shifted to internet-based systems, even as Microsoft's corporate clients publicly dismissed the internet as unsafe. He also revealed that Outlook and Word were meant to share a single formatting engine but never fully merged, a design gap he still regrets. After leaving Microsoft, Evslin moved to AT&T, where he pushed the company to become an internet service provider with flat-rate, all-you-can-eat pricing, despite internal scepticism that a new service couldn't launch in under seven years.
In short
- Ex-Microsoft "internet radical" Tom Evslin recalls building Exchange and Outlook
- Bill Gates delayed internet integration to launch Office, Exchange and NT on time
- Evslin later drove AT&T's WorldNet project and flat-rate internet pricing
Explained simply
Tom Evslin was an early Microsoft engineer in the 1990s who worked on internet-related projects at a time when the company was still deciding how seriously to take the internet. His work fed into what later became Exchange Server and Outlook, Microsoft's email and messaging tools, which were built partly to compete with a rival product called Lotus Notes. He later left Microsoft for AT&T, where he was involved in launching the company's internet service, known as WorldNet.
The wider context is that in the early-to-mid 1990s, big technology and telecoms firms were still working out whether and how to embrace the internet, even though many of their own engineers were already using it day to day. Microsoft, then focused on its Windows and Office software, was primarily concerned with shipping products on schedule rather than building around the internet from the start. AT&T, a long-established telephone company, was similarly weighing whether to move into internet access as a new kind of service for consumers.
Evslin's recollections matter because they offer a first-hand account of how two major companies approached, and sometimes hesitated over, the rise of the internet during this formative period. His experience touches on decisions about product design and pricing that shaped how millions of people first came to use email and internet access.