They also had a “gimmick” where you could literally watch your storage increase down to the billionth percentile or something like that. I seem to remember a counter at the bottom saying my free space available was “1.053746843GB” and it would be moving.

Yup. And back then upload sites were fairly uncommon... MegaUpload was 2 years after G-Mail, but IIRC you had to pay to do a whole lot without time/bandwidth limits.

And as an idea of scale, no, you can't fit a DVD in 1GB. but you could definitely hold a CD, or something between VHS and DVD quality of a movie.

Me? I just used it to hold on to base drivers for my systems and pictures I wanted to not lose. It worked great for a few years.

Yeah, I apologize if I was unclear. Didn't mean to imply that Gmail was unlimited, only that it was in a similar situation (i.e. offering way more disk than most users needed, with the bet that 99% of them won't use anywhere near the limit).