Timeline - 1980-99

1980-84

📜 Smalltalk-80 was the first language variant made available outside of PARC, first as Smalltalk-80 Version 1, given to a small number of firms and universities.

⚙️ The Berkeley r-commands are a suite of computer programs designed to enable users of one Unix system to log in or issue commands to another Unix computer via TCP/IP computer network. Initial release: June 1981

⚙️ IPv4 is described in RFC 791 (1981).

🏢 In March 1982, the US Department of Defense declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking.

🏢 The Mythical Man-Month was reprinted with corrections in 1982

📊 Microsoft Multiplan, an early spreadsheet program developed by Microsoft, was released in August 1982.

📜 Revision Control System (RCS) is an early implementation of a version control system (VCS). It is a set of UNIX commands that allow multiple users to develop and maintain program code or documents. RCS was first released in 1982 by Walter F. Tichy at Purdue University. RCS is currently maintained by the GNU Project.

📜 TeX82, a new version of TeX rewritten from scratch, was published in 1982. Among other changes, the original hyphenation algorithm was replaced by a new algorithm written by Frank Liang.

⚙️ The migration of the ARPANET from NCP to TCP/IP was officially completed on flag day January 1, 1983, when the new protocols were permanently activated.

📊 Lotus 1-2-3 was officially released for the IBM PC on January 26, 1983, quickly becoming the platform's "killer app" by integrating spreadsheet, graphing, and data management capabilities into a single, high-performance program written in x86 assembly.

⚙️ The r-commands (including rlogin, rsh, and rcp) were fully incorporated into 4.2BSD in August 1983, a release that provided the mature interprocess communication (IPC) primitives that enabled them to become the de facto standards for Unix networking throughout the 1980s.

📜 Development of the GNU operating system was initiated by Richard Stallman while he worked at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was called the GNU Project, and was publicly announced on September 27, 1983.

⚙️ The Internet Engineering Task Force published the DNS original specifications in RFC 882 and RFC 883 in November 1983.

⚙️ The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol was implemented on the ARPANET in 1983.

⚙️ The modern Unix pseudoterminal interface originated in 1983 during the development of Eighth Edition Unix and was widely popularized following its inclusion in the 4.2BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) release.

⚙️ In 1984, four UC Berkeley students, Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, David Riggle, and Songnian Zhou, wrote the first Unix name server implementation for the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, commonly referred to as BIND.

🏢 X/Open group was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of information technology.

🏢 Eliyahu M. Goldratt introduced the Theory of Constraints to a wide audience in his business novel, The Goal, in 1984.

📜 TeX has been the official typesetting package for the GNU operating system since 1984.

1985

📜 GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs is written in C and provides Emacs Lisp, also implemented in C, as an extension language. Version 13, the first public release, was made on March 20, 1985.

🏢 The GNU Manifesto is a call-to-action by Richard Stallman encouraging participation and support of the GNU Project's goal in developing the GNU free computer operating system. It was published in March 1985.

📊 Microsoft Excel was first released for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and was the first spreadsheet to allow the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets.

📊 Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2.0 was launched in September 1985, introducing support for macros, add-ins, and expanded memory (EMS), which solidified its dominance in the corporate spreadsheet market.

⚙️ Microsoft Windows was first announced by Bill Gates on November 10, 1983, as a graphical user interface for MS-DOS, and Windows 1.0 was officially released on November 20, 1985.

📜 LaTeX was created in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport when he was working at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He needed to write TeX macros for his own use and thought that with a little extra effort, he could make a general package usable by others. Lamport released versions of his LaTeX macros in 1984 and 1985.

🏢 The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985 as a non-profit corporation supporting free software development.

📜 C++ is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The C++ programming language was initially standardized in 1998 as ISO/IEC 14882:1998, which was then amended by the C++03, C++11, C++14, and C++17 standards. First appeared: 1985

📜 GNU Bison, a free yacc-compatible parser generator, was originally written by Robert Corbett in 1985. Richard Stallman subsequently made it fully yacc-compatible as part of the GNU Project, with Wilfred Hansen of Carnegie Mellon University adding multi-character string literals and other features.

1986

🏢 Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka introduced the term "scrum" in the context of product development in their Harvard Business Review article "The New New Product Development Game" in January–February 1986.

📜 GDB was first written by Richard Stallman in 1986 as part of his GNU system, after his GNU Emacs was "reasonably stable". GDB is free software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Initial release: 1986

🌐 The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents.

📜 Dick Grune at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam developed an early form of CVS in July 1986 as a set of shell scripts wrapping RCS, to allow multiple developers to work on the same files concurrently.

🧠 In machine learning, backpropagation is a widely used algorithm for training feedforward artificial neural networks or other parameterized networks with differentiable nodes. In 1986, David E. Rumelhart et al. published an experimental analysis of the technique. This contributed to the popularization of backpropagation and helped to initiate an active period of research in multilayer perceptrons.

🧠 The term Deep Learning was introduced to the machine learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986.

📊 gnuplot is a command-line and GUI program that can generate two- and three-dimensional plots of functions, data, and data fits. The program runs on all major computers and operating systems (Linux, Unix, Microsoft Windows, macOS, FreeDOS, and many others). Initial release: 1986

📊 The POSTGRES project officially launched at UC Berkeley in 1986 under the leadership of Michael Stonebraker, aiming to solve the limitations of the relational model by introducing object-relational concepts.

1987

📜 The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating systems. When it was first released in 1987 by Richard Stallman, GCC 1.0 was named the GNU C Compiler since it only handled the C programming language. GCC was first released March 22, 1987, available by FTP from MIT.

📜 flex (Fast Lexical Analyzer Generator) is a free reimplementation of lex that produces faster and more efficient C code for scanners. It was written by Vern Paxson at UC Berkeley around 1987 with inspiration from Van Jacobson, removing the proprietary licensing restrictions that had limited the original AT&T lex's adoption outside commercial Unix environments.

🏢 Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister was first published in 1987

⚙️ Windows 2.0, released on December 9, 1987, introduced overlapping windows, desktop icons, and keyboard shortcuts, significantly improving the user experience over the previous version.

📜 Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. First appeared: December 18, 1987

📊 The first Windows version of Excel was released on November 19, 1987, numbered as version 2.0 to be in line with the Macintosh version, and included a run-time version of Windows.

📜 In 1987, a committee of researchers convened to create a standardized, purely functional language, which would come to be known as Haskell.

📜 Self is an object-oriented programming language based on the concept of prototypes. Self began as a dialect of Smalltalk, being dynamically typed and using just-in-time compilation (JIT) as well as the prototype-based approach to objects. Self was designed mostly by David Ungar and Randall Smith in 1986 while working at Xerox PARC. First appeared: 1987

📜 The first implementation of Caml (Categorical Abstract Machine Language) was created by Ascánder Suárez at INRIA in 1987, based on the Categorical Abstract Machine compiling method. First appeared: 1987

📊 SQL was adopted as a standard by the ANSI in 1986 as SQL-86 and the ISO in 1987.

1988

📊 Wolfram Mathematica (also known as Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimization, plotting functions and various types of data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other programming languages. Initial release: June 23, 1988

🌐 Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a text-based chat system, was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 at the University of Oulu, Finland, originally intended to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox.

🐛 The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988, is one of the oldest computer worms distributed via the Internet, and the first to gain significant mainstream media attention.

🔐 X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates. X.509 First published 1.0 at November 25, 1988

📜 GNU Make (short gmake) is the standard implementation of Make for Linux and macOS. It provides several extensions over the original Make, such as conditionals. It also provides many built-in functions which can be used to eliminate the need for shell-scripting in the makefile rules as well as to manipulate the variables set and used in the makefile. First release: 1988

📊 GNU Octave was conceived in 1988 by John W. Eaton at the University of Texas at Austin as a high-level language for numerical computations, originally intended as a companion for a chemical reactor design course.

📜 AWK was significantly revised and expanded in 1985-88, resulting in the GNU AWK implementation written by Paul Rubin, Jay Fenlason, and Richard Stallman, released in 1988.

🏢 The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit industry consortium for creating an open standard for an implementation of the operating system Unix. It was formed in 1988.

📜 The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interfaces (API). Started: 1988

📊 The concept of data warehousing dates back to the late 1980s when IBM researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy developed the "business data warehouse". In 1988, Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy publish the article "An architecture for a business and information system" where they introduce the term "business data warehouse".

1989

🔐 Kerberos is a computer-network authentication protocol that works on the basis of tickets to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed Kerberos in 1988 to protect network services provided by Project Athena. Kerberos version 4, the first public version, was released on January 24, 1989.

📊 Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications. Initial release: April 24, 1989

📜 Brian Berliner redesigned and rewrote CVS in C in April 1989, vastly improving performance and reliability over Grune's original shell script implementation.

🖥️ Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989, it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions. Initial release: June 8, 1989

📊 Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3.0 was released in June 1989 as a major rewrite in the C language, introducing "3D spreadsheets" with multiple worksheets in a single file, though it required newer 80286-based hardware to run.

📊 POSTGRES Version 1 was released to a small group of external users in June 1989, marking the first public implementation of the extensible database system developed at Berkeley.

🌐 The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. Development of HTTP was initiated by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and summarized in a simple document describing the behavior of a client and a server using the first HTTP protocol version that was named 0.9.

1990

🏢 The book "The Machine That Changed the World" was published in 1990, coining the term "Lean Manufacturing" to describe the Toyota Production System methodology to the West.

⚙️ Windows 3.0, launched on May 22, 1990, became the first version of Windows to achieve widespread commercial success, featuring a completely redesigned user interface and improved memory management for 386 processors.

⚙️ Microsoft released OLE 1.0 (Object Linking and Embedding) in 1990, introducing the first document-linking and embedding technology for Windows that allowed software components to interact.

📜 groff (also called GNU troff) is a typesetting system that creates formatted output when given plain text mixed with formatting commands. The first version, 0.3.1, was released June 1990.

📜 The first version of the language definition, Haskell 1.0, was published in 1990.

📜 CVS (Concurrent Versions System) version 1.0 was publicly released on November 19, 1990, becoming one of the dominant version control systems throughout the 1990s.

📜 flex was publicly released in 1990 under a BSD-style license by the Regents of the University of California, making it the first freely available replacement for the proprietary AT&T lex and enabling widespread adoption across open-source Unix projects.

🌐 CERN httpd (later also known as W3C httpd) is an early, now discontinued, web server (HTTP) daemon originally developed at CERN from 1990 onwards by Tim Berners-Lee, Ari Luotonen and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. Implemented in C, it was the first web server software. Initial release: 24 December 1990

🌐 In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee's proposals for hypertext implicitly introduced the idea of a URL as a short string representing a resource that is the target of a hyperlink.

1991

🌐 The first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was developed in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee for the NeXT Computer and introduced to his colleagues at CERN in March 1991.

⚙️ The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. In April 1991, Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, started working on a simple operating system inspired by UNIX for his i386-based PC, beginning with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly language and a terminal driver.

⚙️ Linus Torvalds announced his project on the comp.os.minix newsgroup on August 25, 1991, famously describing it as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu."

⚙️ On 17 September 1991, Torvalds released version 0.01 of the Linux kernel on the FUNET FTP server. It was not yet executable and required MINIX for compilation.

⚙️ On 5 October 1991, Torvalds announced the first "official" version of Linux, version 0.02. At this point, the kernel was capable of running the Bash shell and GCC.

📜 Vim (a contraction of Vi IMproved) is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. It is an improved clone of Bill Joy's vi. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, derived Vim from a port of the Stevie editor for Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Initial release: 2 November 1991

📜 Python is a high-level, interpreted, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Guido van Rossum began working on Python in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC programming language and first released it in 1991 as Python 0.9.0.

🧠 In 1991, the autoencoder was first proposed as a nonlinear generalization of principal components analysis (PCA) by Kramer.

🔐 Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions and to increase the security of e-mail communications. Phil Zimmermann developed PGP in 1991.

⚙️ In 1991, the rlogin protocol was formally defined in RFC 1282, documenting the existing practice that had been widely adopted by the Unix community for over a decade.

1992

⚙️ Windows 3.1, released on April 6, 1992, introduced TrueType fonts, the Windows Registry, and dropped support for Real Mode, marking a major step toward a more modern operating system architecture.

⚙️ Linux 0.12 was released on February 1, 1992, under the GNU General Public License (GPL), marking a pivotal shift from its original restrictive license.

🔐 MD5 is one in a series of message digest algorithms designed by Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT (Rivest, 1992). When analytic work indicated that MD5's predecessor MD4 was likely to be insecure, Rivest designed MD5 in 1991 as a secure replacement. First published: April 1992

🌐 libwww (Library World Wide Web) is a modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows. It is also the name of the reference implementation of the libwww API. In 1991 and 1992, Tim Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-François Groff rewrote various components of the original WorldWideWeb browser for the NeXTstep operating system in portable C code, in order to demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web. Initial release: 1.0, November 1992

🏢 In November 1992 the IETF "URI Working Group" met for the first time.

📜 CTAN (an acronym for "Comprehensive TeX Archive Network") is the authoritative place where TeX related material and software can be found for download. CTAN was built in 1992, by Rainer Schöpf and Joachim Schrod in Germany, Sebastian Rahtz in the UK, and George Greenwade in the U.S. CTAN was officially announced at the EuroTeX conference at Aston University, 1993. The WEB server itself is maintained by Gerd Neugebauer.

🏢 The term technical debt is a qualitative description of the cost to maintain a system that is attributable to choosing an expedient solution for its development. The term was coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992. After reading Metaphors We Live By, Ward devised this debt metaphor to explain to his boss the need to refactor the financial product they were working on.

⚙️ The original Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) was introduced in 1992 in a research paper by Steven McCanne and Van Jacobson. It provided a way to filter network packets in the kernel, minimizing data copying between the kernel and user space.

1993

🌐 NCSA Mosaic 0.5, the first alpha/beta version of the web browser developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), was announced by Marc Andreessen for the X Window System on January 23, 1993.

⚙️ The NetBSD source code repository was established on March 21, 1993. The project was founded by Chris Demetriou, Theo de Raadt, Adam Glass, and Charles Hannum as a more open and community-driven alternative to 386BSD.

🌐 NCSA Mosaic 1.0 for the X Window System was officially released on April 21, 1993. It was the first browser to display images inline with text using the <img> tag, rather than in a separate window, which was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web.

⚙️ The name FreeBSD was officially chosen by David Greenman on June 19, 1993. The project began as an effort to maintain the "unofficial 386BSD patchkit" after 386BSD development slowed earlier in the year.

📊 R was started by professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman as a programming language to teach introductory statistics at the University of Auckland. First appeared: August 1993

🌐 NCSA released the first versions of Mosaic for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh in September 1993, making the web accessible to non-technical home users.

⚙️ Debian, also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project. The first version of Debian (0.01) was released on September 15, 1993.

⚙️ FreeBSD 1.0-RELEASE was published on November 1, 1993, based on 4.3BSD-Net/2 and 386BSD. This initial release provided a robust BSD-based operating system for the PC architecture.

🌐 NCSA Mosaic 2.0 for Unix was released on November 10, 1993. It introduced support for HTML forms, which enabled the creation of the first dynamic and interactive web pages.

⚙️ The Component Object Model (COM) was officially introduced in 1993 as the underlying binary architecture for OLE 2.0, establishing a language-independent standard for software component interoperability.

⚙️ In 1993, Microsoft introduced OLE Automation, which enabled applications such as Microsoft Excel to expose their functionality to external scripting languages like Visual Basic.

📊 Microsoft released Excel 5.0 in 1993, which included Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language that added the ability to automate tasks and provide user-defined functions.

⚙️ In 1993, Microsoft launched Windows NT 3.1, the first version of the "New Technology" (NT) line, which featured a robust 32-bit kernel designed for high-end workstations and servers, separate from the consumer-oriented DOS-based line.

⚙️ CFEngine is an open-source configuration management system, written by Mark Burgess. Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of large-scale computer systems. The CFEngine project began in 1993 as a way for author Mark Burgess to get his work done by automating the management of a small group of workstations in the Department of Theoretical Physics. Initial release: 1993

🌐 The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. Initial release: 1993

🌐 Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is an interface specification that enables web servers to execute an external program, typically to process user requests. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) team wrote the specification for calling command line executables on the www-talk mailing list.

🌐 NCSA HTTPd is an early, now discontinued, web server originally developed at the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign by Robert McCool and others. First released in 1993, it was among the earliest web servers developed.

1994

📊 GNU Octave 1.0 was officially released on February 17, 1994, establishing itself as a robust tool for scientific computing and engineering within the GNU project.

⚙️ Linux version 0.95 was the first to be capable of running the X Window System. Linux 1.0.0 was released on March 14, 1994, consisting of 176,250 lines of code. It was the first version suitable for use in production environments.

🏢 In June 1994, the IETF published Berners-Lee's first Request for Comments that acknowledged the existence of URLs and URNs.

🏢 The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee. Formation: 1 October 1994

📜 Perl 5.000 was released on October 17, 1994. It was a nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter, and it added many new features to the language, including objects, references, lexical (my) variables, and modules

🌐 Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s. Initial release: 15 December 1994

🩷 The QR code system was invented in 1994, at the Denso Wave automotive products company, in Japan.

1995

🔐 Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. Netscape developed the original SSL protocols, and Taher Elgamal, chief scientist at Netscape Communications from 1995 to 1998, has been described as the "father of SSL". SSL Version 2.0, after being released in February 1995 was quickly discovered to contain a number of security and usability flaws.

📜 Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. Java SE defines a range of general-purpose APIs and also includes the Java Language Specification and the Java Virtual Machine Specification. First appeared: May 23, 1995

📊 MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and is also available under a variety of proprietary licenses. Initial release: 23 May 1995

🌐 PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. PHP First appeared: June 8, 1995

⚙️ Windows 95, released on August 24, 1995, was a massive consumer release that introduced the iconic Start menu, the Taskbar, and Plug and Play technology, while moving the consumer line toward a 32-bit architecture.

⚙️ Theo de Raadt created the OpenBSD CVS repository on October 18, 1995, marking the official start of the project as a fork of NetBSD. The project was established following disagreements between de Raadt and the NetBSD core team, with a new focus on proactive security and code correctness.

📜 CPAN was conceived in 1993 and has been active online since October 1995. It is based on the CTAN model and began as a place to unify the structure of scattered Perl archives. On October 26, 1995, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) was established as a repository for the Perl language and Perl modules.

📜 Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language which supports multiple programming paradigms. The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on December 21, 1995.

🌐 In December 1995, Sun Microsystems and Netscape announced JavaScript in a press release. The first JavaScript engine was created by Brendan Eich in 1995 for the Netscape Navigator web browser. It was a rudimentary interpreter for the nascent language Eich invented.

📊 The predecessor of NumPy, Numeric, was originally created by Jim Hugunin with contributions from several other developers. Initial release: 1995

🌐 The Apache HTTP Server is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. Initial release: 1995

🔐 SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a hash function which takes an input and produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest – typically rendered as 40 hexadecimal digits. It was designed by the United States National Security Agency, and is a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard. First published: 1995

🔐 SSH was designed as a replacement for Telnet and for unsecured remote shell protocols such as the Berkeley rsh and the related rlogin and rexec protocols. In 1995, Tatu Ylönen, a researcher at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, designed the first version of the protocol (now called SSH-1) prompted by a password-sniffing attack at his university network.

🏢 The Mythical Man-Month was republished in an anniversary edition with four extra chapters in 1995

🏢 Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland formally presented the Scrum framework at the OOPSLA '95 conference in Austin, Texas, in 1995.

1996

⚙️ Debian first stable version (1.1) was released on June 17, 1996.

📊 PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was first released as an open-source project on July 8, 1996, and on October 22, 1996, the website PostgreSQL.org was launched as the project was officially renamed to reflect its SQL support.

🌐 Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML. Initial release: 17 December 1996

🏢 The Open Group is a global consortium that seeks to "enable the achievement of business objectives" by developing "open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications." It was established in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation.

📜 Objective Caml (OCaml) was first released in 1996. Didier Rémy and Jérôme Vouillon integrated a powerful, statically type-safe object and class system into Caml Special Light, giving the language its "Objective" prefix. First appeared: 1996

🖥️ IntelliSense is Microsoft's implementation of code completion, best known in Visual Studio. It was first introduced as a feature of a mainstream Microsoft product in 1996 building on many already invented concepts of code completion and syntax checking.

🌐 Microsoft launched ActiveX in 1996 as a rebranded and simplified set of COM-based technologies specifically optimized for the web and integration with Internet Explorer.

🌐 HTTP/1 was finalized and fully documented (as version 1.0) in 1996.

🌐 In 1996, the iframe tag was introduced by Internet Explorer; like the object element, it can load or fetch content asynchronously.

🔐 Newer versions of SSL/TLS are based on SSL 3.0, released in 1996.

1997

📊 PostgreSQL 6.0 was released on January 29, 1997, as the first formal release under the new name, introducing unique indexes and the pg_dumpall utility.

🖥️ Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Microsoft first released Visual Studio in 1997, bundling many of its programming tools together for the first time. Visual Studio 97 / 1997-03-19

🏢 The essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond was first presented at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997

🌐 The first edition of ECMA-262 (ECMAScript) was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly in June 1997.

🏢 The unified modeling language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. UML 1.1 was submitted to the OMG in August 1997 and adopted by the OMG in November 1997.

📊 The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) is R's central software repository, supported by the R Foundation. CRAN was created by Kurt Hornik and Friedrich Leisch in 1997, with the name paralleling other early packing systems such as TeX's CTAN (released 1992) and Perl's CPAN (released 1995).

🌐 Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

🧠 A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neural networks where connections between nodes can create a cycle, allowing output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. This allows it to exhibit temporal dynamic behavior. Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks were invented by Hochreiter and Schmidhuber in 1997 and set accuracy records in multiple applications domains.

🌐 Google Search is a search engine operated by Google. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. Launched: 1997

1998

🏢 Netscape Communications Corporation announced on January 22, 1998, that it would release the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product as free software.

🌐 Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. First published: February 10, 1998

🏢 The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. The organization was founded in late February 1998 by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, part of a group inspired by Netscape's announcement to open-source its browser suite.

🏢 Netscape Communications Corporation released the source code for Netscape Communicator and started the Mozilla project on March 31, 1998, influenced by "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"

⚙️ Advanced package tool, or APT, is a free-software user interface that works with core libraries to handle the installation and removal of software on Debian, and Debian-based Linux distributions. APT Initial release: 31 March 1998

🌐 The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an XML or HTML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. First published: October 1, 1998

🔐 OpenSSL is a software library for applications that secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping or need to identify the party at the other end. It is widely used by Internet servers, including the majority of HTTPS websites. The OpenSSL project was founded in 1998 to provide a free set of encryption tools for the code used on the Internet. Initial release: 23 December 1998

🌐 LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) is an acronym denoting one of the most common software stacks for many of the web's most popular applications. The acronym LAMP was coined by Michael Kunze in the December 1998 issue of Computertechnik, a German computing magazine, as he demonstrated that a bundle of free and open-source software "could be a feasible alternative to expensive commercial packages".

📜 In 1998, the Ruby Application Archive was launched by Matsumoto, along with a simple English-language homepage for Ruby.

🏢 The Halloween documents comprise a series of confidential Microsoft memoranda on potential strategies relating to free software, open-source software, and to Linux in particular, and a series of media responses to these memoranda. Both the leaked documents and the responses were published by open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond in 1998.

🌐 In 1998, the Microsoft Outlook Web Access team developed the concept behind the XMLHttpRequest scripting object. XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is an API in the form of an object whose methods transfer data between a web browser and a web server. The object is provided by the browser's JavaScript environment.

🔐 AppArmor ("Application Armor") is a Linux kernel security module that allows the system administrator to restrict programs' capabilities with per-program profiles. Profiles can allow capabilities like network access, raw socket access, and the permission to read, write, or execute files on matching paths. Initial release: 1998

🌐 Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its powerful regular expression and string parsing abilities.

⚙️ Between 1998 and 2004, CFEngine grew in adoption along with the popularity of Linux as a computing platform.

1999

🔐 TLS 1.0 was first defined in RFC 2246 in January 1999 as an upgrade of SSL Version 3.0.

🏢 Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and application development. Salesforce was founded on March 8, 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.

🏢 The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the Apache HTTP Server, and incorporated on March 25, 1999.

🐛 The Melissa virus was a fast-spreading macro virus that first appeared around March 26, 1999. The virus mainly attacked computers using Microsoft Word and Outlook.

📜 HotSpot, released as Java HotSpot Performance Engine, is a Java virtual machine for desktop and server computers, developed by Sun Microsystems and now maintained and distributed by Oracle Corporation. It features improved performance via methods such as just-in-time compilation and adaptive optimization. The Java HotSpot Performance Engine was released on April 27, 1999, built on technologies from an implementation of the programming language Smalltalk named Strongtalk. Initially available as an add-on for Java 1.2, HotSpot became the default Sun JVM in Java 1.3.

⚙️ VMware Workstation Pro (known as VMware Workstation until release of VMware Workstation 12 in 2015) is a hosted hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems. VMware Workstation Initial release: 15 May 1999

⚙️ RRDtool (round-robin database tool) aims to handle time series data such as network bandwidth, temperatures or CPU load. RRDtool Initial release: July 16, 1999

🔐 GnuPG was initially developed by Werner Koch. The first production version, version 1.0.0, was released on September 7, 1999, almost two years after the first GnuPG release (version 0.0.0).

📜 In 1999, the Haskell 98 Report was published, defining a stable, minimal, and portable version of the language.

🏢 Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. Kent Beck developed extreme programming during his work. He began to refine the development methodology used in the project and wrote a book on the methodology (Extreme Programming Explained, published in October 1999).

🏢 The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master is a book about computer programming and software engineering, written by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas and published in October 1999.

🖥️ GNU nano is a text editor for Unix-like computing systems or operating environments using a command line interface. Initial release: 18 November 1999

🔐 OpenBSD 2.6 was released on December 1, 1999, featuring the first release of OpenSSH. Originally developed as a free replacement for the proprietary SSH suite, OpenSSH is based on the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol and provides a secure channel over an unsecured network in a client–server architecture.

📜 Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web services. Initial specification release: 1999-12-17

🏢 Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams was revised for its 2nd Edition in 1999

🏢 The book The Cathedral and the Bazaar was published in 1999 and was released under the Open Publication License v2.0 in the same year.

🏢 Nikolai Bezroukov published two critical essays on Eric Raymond's views of open source software in 1999

🌐 SourceForge, founded in 1999 by VA Software, was the first provider of a centralized location for free and open-source software developers to control and manage software development and offering this service without charge.