Timeline - 1980-99
1985β
π₯οΈ Apple and Adobe announced the LaserWriter on January 23, 1985 β the first printer to ship with PostScript β at Apple's annual shareholder meeting. Aldus simultaneously announced PageMaker, triggering the desktop publishing revolution.
π GNU Emacs is a free software text editor created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems, written in C and providing Emacs Lisp (also implemented in C) as an extension language, with version 13 as the first public release on March 20, 1985.
π’ 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.
π₯οΈ Aldus PageMaker 1.0 was released in July 1985 for the Macintosh with native PostScript support, becoming the first widely adopted desktop publishing application and cementing PostScript as the standard page description language for professional printing. PageMaker won a Codie Award for Best New Use of a Computer in 1986.
π 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.
π 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.
βοΈ 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.
π LaTeX was created in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport while working at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), originally written to fulfill his own need for TeX macros but designed with the intent to be made into a general package usable by others, with versions released in 1984 and 1985.
π’ The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985 as a non-profit corporation supporting free software development.
π 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"), first appearing in 1985 and initially standardized in 1998 as ISO/IEC 14882:1998, which was subsequently amended by the C++03, C++11, C++14, and C++17 standards.
π 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.
1986β
π’ 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 JanuaryβFebruary 1986.
π GDB is free software released under the GNU General Public License, first written by Richard Stallman in 1986 as part of his GNU system after GNU Emacs reached a "reasonably stable" state.
π The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents.
π 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.
π§ In machine learning, backpropagation is a widely used algorithm for training feedforward artificial neural networks or other parameterized networks with differentiable nodes, with David E. Rumelhart et al. publishing an experimental analysis in 1986 that contributed to its popularization and helped initiate an active period of research in multilayer perceptrons.
π§ The term Deep Learning was introduced to the machine learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986.
π gnuplot is a command-line and GUI program that can generate two- and three-dimensional plots of functions, data, and data fits across all major computers and operating systems (Linux, Unix, Microsoft Windows, macOS, FreeDOS, and many others), first released in 1986.
π 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.
1987β
βοΈ The Macintosh SE and Macintosh II were both introduced at the AppleWorld conference in Los Angeles on March 2, 1987. The Macintosh II was Apple's first modular and color-capable Macintosh, breaking from the all-in-one design of earlier models.
π The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures, and operating systems. Originally named the GNU C Compiler when first released by Richard Stallman on March 22, 1987 (available via FTP from MIT) because it only supported the C programming language, GCC has since evolved to support many more languages.
π 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.
π’ Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister was first published in 1987.
βοΈ 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.
π Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier, first appearing on December 18, 1987.
π 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.
π In 1987, a committee of researchers convened to create a standardized, purely functional language, which would come to be known as Haskell.
π Self is an object-oriented programming language based on the concept of prototypes, designed mostly by David Ungar and Randall Smith while working at Xerox PARC in 1986. It began as a Smalltalk dialect with dynamic typing, just-in-time compilation (JIT), and a prototype-based approach to objects, first appearing in 1987.
π The first implementation of Caml (Categorical Abstract Machine Language) was created by AscΓ‘nder SuΓ‘rez at INRIA in 1987 based on the Categorical Abstract Machine compiling method.
π SQL was adopted as a standard by the ANSI in 1986 as SQL-86 and the ISO in 1987.
1988β
π Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for technical computing including machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimization, plotting, algorithm implementation, user interface creation, and interfacing with programs in other languages, first released on June 23, 1988.
π©· Joe Becker of Xerox published a draft proposal in August 1988 for an international/multilingual text character encoding system tentatively called "Unicode," outlined in a document entitled Unicode 88, proposing a 16-bit character scheme developed with Lee Collins and Mark Davis of Apple.
π 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.
π 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.
π X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates, first published on November 25, 1988.
π GNU Make (short gmake) is the standard implementation of Make for Linux and macOS, providing several extensions over the original Make such as conditionals, built-in functions to eliminate the need for shell scripting in makefile rules, and the ability to manipulate variables, first released in 1988.
π 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.
π 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.
π’ The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit industry consortium formed in 1988 to create an open standard for Unix operating system implementations.
π The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems, defining both system- and user-level application programming interfaces (APIs), developed starting in 1988.
π The concept of data warehousing dates back to the late 1980s when IBM researchers Barry Devlin and Paul Murphy developed the "business data warehouse" and published the article "An architecture for a business and information system" in 1988 introducing the term to the broader audience.
1989β
π Kerberos is a computer-network authentication protocol that works using tickets to allow nodes communicating over non-secure networks to prove their identity to one another securely, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1988 to protect network services provided by Project Athena. Kerberos version 4, the first public version, was released on January 24, 1989.
π Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft that functions as a database server with the primary purpose of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications, with initial release on April 24, 1989.
π Brian Berliner redesigned and rewrote CVS in C in April 1989, vastly improving performance and reliability over Grune's original shell script implementation.
π₯οΈ 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 on June 8, 1989, and has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions.
π 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.
π 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.
βοΈ NeXTSTEP 1.0, the object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer founded by Steve Jobs after leaving Apple in 1985, was released on September 18, 1989. Built on the Mach kernel and BSD, it would later become the foundation for Mac OS X and modern macOS.
π 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.
1990β
π’ 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.
βοΈ 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.
βοΈ 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.
π groff (also called GNU troff) is a typesetting system that creates formatted output when given plain text mixed with formatting commands, with version 0.3.1 first released in June 1990.
π The first version of the language definition, Haskell 1.0, was published in 1990.
π 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.
π 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.
π 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, with its initial release on December 24, 1990.
π 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.
1991β
π©· The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3, 1991, as a non-profit organization to develop, extend, and promote the use of the Unicode Standard.
π 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.
βοΈ 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.
βοΈ 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."
βοΈ 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.
βοΈ 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.
π©· Unicode 1.0 was published in October 1991, encoding 7,161 characters from 24 scripts in a unified 16-bit character set intended to encompass all modern writing systems.
π Vim (a contraction of Vi IMproved) is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program and 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 the initial version to the public on November 2, 1991.
π Python is a high-level, interpreted, general-purpose programming language with design philosophy emphasizing code readability through 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.
π§ In 1991, the autoencoder was first proposed as a nonlinear generalization of principal components analysis (PCA) by Kramer.
π 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.
βοΈ 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.
1992β
βοΈ 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.
βοΈ 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.
π MD5 is one in a series of message digest algorithms designed by Professor Ronald Rivest of MIT. When analytic work indicated that MD5's predecessor MD4 was likely to be insecure, Rivest designed MD5 in 1991 as a secure replacement and first published it in April 1992.
π©· UTF-8 was designed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike on September 2, 1992, sketched on a placemat in a New Jersey diner. They implemented it and updated Plan 9 from Bell Labs to use it throughout, creating a self-synchronizing, backward-compatible variable-length encoding for Unicode.
π libwww (Library World Wide Web) is a modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows, and the reference implementation of the libwww API. In 1991 and 1992, Tim Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-FranΓ§ois Groff rewrote various components of the original WorldWideWeb browser for the NeXTstep operating system in portable C code to demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web, with version 1.0 initially released in November 1992.
π’ In November 1992 the IETF "URI Working Group" met for the first time.
π CTAN (an acronym for "Comprehensive TeX Archive Network") is the authoritative place where TeX related material and software can be found for download. Built in 1992 by Rainer SchΓΆpf and Joachim Schrod in Germany, Sebastian Rahtz in the UK, and George Greenwade in the U.S., it was officially announced at the EuroTeX conference at Aston University in 1993. The WEB server itself is maintained by Gerd Neugebauer.
π’ 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.
βοΈ 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.
1993β
π 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.
π PDF (Portable Document Format) was publicly introduced by Adobe Systems in January 1993 at the Windows and OS/2 Conference. Adobe made the PDF 1.0 specification freely available and released Acrobat 1.0 as the first reader/writer, aiming to enable consistent document exchange across any platform.
βοΈ 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.
π 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.
βοΈ 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.
π R was started by professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman as a programming language to teach introductory statistics at the University of Auckland, first appearing in August 1993.
π 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.
βοΈ 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.
βοΈ 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.
π 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.
βοΈ 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.
βοΈ In 1993, Microsoft introduced OLE Automation, which enabled applications such as Microsoft Excel to expose their functionality to external scripting languages like Visual Basic.
π 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.
βοΈ 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.
βοΈ CFEngine is an open-source configuration management system written by Mark Burgess that provides 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.
π The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser, with its initial release in 1993.
π FutureWave Software (founded by Charlie Jackson, Jonathan Gay, and Michelle Alsip-Welsh) published SmartSketch in 1993, a vector drawing application for pen computers. This was the earliest precursor to what would become Adobe Flash.
π 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.
π NCSA HTTPd is an early, now discontinued, web server originally developed at the NCSA at the University of Illinois at UrbanaβChampaign by Robert McCool and others, first released in 1993 and among the earliest web servers developed.
1994β
π 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.
βοΈ 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.
π’ In June 1994, the IETF published Berners-Lee's first Request for Comments that acknowledged the existence of URLs and URNs.
π’ The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web, founded on October 1, 1994, and led by Tim Berners-Lee.
π 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
π Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser and the original browser of the Netscape line (versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x), serving as the flagship product of Netscape Communications Corp and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, with initial release on December 15, 1994.
π©· The QR code system was invented in 1994, at the Denso Wave automotive products company, in Japan.
π SUnit, the first unit testing framework, was created by Kent Beck for Smalltalk in 1994. It introduced the test fixture pattern β setUp, test methods, and tearDown β that underlies the entire xUnit family of frameworks.
1995β
π 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.
π Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems, Java SE defines a range of general-purpose APIs and includes the Java Language Specification and the Java Virtual Machine Specification, first appearing on May 23, 1995.
π Java Applets were introduced with Java 1.0a2 and the HotJava browser, publicly demonstrated at SunWorld on May 23, 1995. They allowed small Java programs to be embedded in web pages and executed inside a sandboxed JVM provided by a browser plugin (NPAPI), enabling interactive content on the web.
π MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) available as free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and also available under a variety of proprietary licenses, with initial release on May 23, 1995.
π PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development, originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 and first appearing on June 8, 1995.
βοΈ 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.
βοΈ 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.
π CPAN was conceived in 1993 and has been active online since October 1995, based on the CTAN model and beginning 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.
π 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.
π 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.
π The predecessor of NumPy, Numeric, was originally created by Jim Hugunin with contributions from several other developers, with initial release in 1995.
π The Apache HTTP Server is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0, developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, with initial release in 1995.
π 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 β typically rendered as 40 hexadecimal digits. Designed by the United States National Security Agency, it is a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard first published in 1995.
π 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 YlΓΆnen, 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.
π’ The Mythical Man-Month was republished in an anniversary edition with four extra chapters in 1995
π’ Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland formally presented the Scrum framework at the OOPSLA '95 conference in Austin, Texas, in 1995.
1996β
π©· UTF-8 was first formally standardized in January 1996 as RFC 2044, defining it as a transformation format for encoding Unicode characters for use in MIME and Internet protocols while preserving US-ASCII compatibility.
π Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released in March 1996 with Java Applet support via the NPAPI plugin architecture, making applets broadly accessible and sparking their rapid adoption across the web.
βοΈ Debian first stable version (1.1) was released on June 17, 1996.
π 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.
π 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, with initial release on December 17, 1996.
π’ 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.
π Objective Caml (OCaml) was first released in 1996, when Didier RΓ©my and JΓ©rΓ΄me Vouillon integrated a powerful, statically type-safe object and class system into Caml Special Light, giving the language its "Objective" prefix.
π₯οΈ 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.
π 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.
π HTTP/1 was finalized and fully documented (as version 1.0) in 1996.
π In 1996, the iframe tag was introduced by Internet Explorer; like the object element, it can load or fetch content asynchronously.
π Newer versions of SSL/TLS are based on SSL 3.0, released in 1996.
π In December 1996, Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software and rebranded FutureSplash Animator as Macromedia Flash 1.0, distributing Flash Player as a free browser plugin to rapidly gain market share and establish Flash as the dominant platform for interactive web content.
1997β
π 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.
βοΈ Apple Computer acquired NeXT for $427 million on February 4, 1997, gaining the OPENSTEP operating system and bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple. The NeXTSTEP-derived codebase would serve as the foundation for Mac OS X.
π₯οΈ Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft used to develop computer programs, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Microsoft first released Visual Studio on March 19, 1997, bundling many of its programming tools together for the first time as Visual Studio 97.
π’ The essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond was first presented at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997
π The first edition of ECMA-262 (ECMAScript) was adopted by the Ecma General Assembly in June 1997.
π’ 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.
π 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).
π 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.
π§ 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.
π Google Search is a search engine operated by Google that uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query, launched in 1997.
π JUnit was created by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma during a flight from Zurich to OOPSLA 1997 in Atlanta, porting Beck's SUnit framework to Java using pair programming and test-first development. It became the dominant testing framework for Java and established automated unit testing as a standard engineering practice.
1998β
π’ Netscape Communications Corporation announced on January 22, 1998, that it would release the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product as free software.
π Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data, defining a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. It was first published on February 10, 1998.
π’ 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.
π’ 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"
βοΈ 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, with initial release on March 31, 1998.
βοΈ The iMac G3 began shipping on August 15, 1998, featuring a translucent Bondi Blue enclosure designed by Jony Ive. It dropped legacy ports like SCSI and floppy drives in favor of USB, and is widely credited with saving Apple from near-bankruptcy after Steve Jobs's return.
π 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. It was first published on October 1, 1998.
π 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, 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, with initial release on December 23, 1998.
π 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".
π In 1998, the Ruby Application Archive was launched by Matsumoto, along with a simple English-language homepage for Ruby.
π’ 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.
π 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.
π AppArmor ("Application Armor") is a Linux kernel security module that allows the system administrator to restrict programs' capabilities with per-program profiles allowing capabilities like network access, raw socket access, and the permission to read, write, or execute files on matching paths. It was initially released in 1998.
π 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.
βοΈ Between 1998 and 2004, CFEngine grew in adoption along with the popularity of Linux as a computing platform.
1999β
π TLS 1.0 was first defined in RFC 2246 in January 1999 as an upgrade of SSL Version 3.0.
βοΈ Mac OS X Server 1.0 was released on March 16, 1999, as the first operating system from Apple built on the NeXTSTEP codebase acquired from NeXT. It used a modified version of the classic Mac OS GUI and served as a precursor to the consumer Mac OS X.
π’ 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.
π’ 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.
π 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.
π 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.
βοΈ 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, with initial release on May 15, 1999.
βοΈ RRDtool (round-robin database tool) aims to handle time series data such as network bandwidth, temperatures or CPU load, with initial release on July 16, 1999.
π GnuPG was initially developed by Werner Koch, with the first production version (1.0.0) released on September 7, 1999, almost two years after the first GnuPG release (version 0.0.0).
π In 1999, the Haskell 98 Report was published, defining a stable, minimal, and portable version of the language.
π’ 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).
π’ 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.
π₯οΈ GNU nano is a text editor for Unix-like computing systems or operating environments using a command line interface, with initial release on November 18, 1999.
π 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 clientβserver architecture.
π 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, with initial specification release on December 17, 1999.
π’ Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams was revised for its 2nd Edition in 1999
π’ 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.
π’ Nikolai Bezroukov published two critical essays on Eric Raymond's views of open source software in 1999
π 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.