FeedsTen years ago: 1998
It's often quite fun to take a look way back, and see just how far we've come since. This is a look back at what happened in the year 1998.
Operating system versions in 1998:
- The Linux kernel versions 2.0.34, 2.0.35 and 2.0.36 were all released in 1998
- FreeBSD had quite a busy year: 2.2.6, 2.2.7, 2.2.8 and 3.0 were released
- OpenBSD released 2.3 and 2.4
- NetBSD launched major version 1.3 and it's bugfix releases 1.3.1, 1.3.2 and 1.3.3
- RedHat released versions 5.1 and 5.2 of their Linux distributions
- Linux-Mandrake (now called Mandriva) released their first ever version 5.1 and 5.2 a while later, based on the RedHat releases
- Debian GNU/Linux released 2.0
- Slackware announced 3.5 and 3.6
- SuSE released 5.2
- Ubuntu, Heh, just kidding, Ubuntu didn't even exist until 2004
Programming languages
Other interesting stuff:
january:
- Eight months after Eric S. Raymond’s well-known paper ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar‘, Netscape Communications Inc. announces plans to give away the source for their Netscape Communicator browser suite.
- LWN (Linux Weekly News) launches their first issue
february:
- mozilla.org launches
- Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens form the Open Source Initiative
march:
may:
- a new search engine comes online, they’ve called it ‘Google‘. You may have heard about it
june:
- The Gimp 1.0 was released
july:
- KDE 1.0 was released
october:
- Debian GNU/Linux drops KDE from its distribution due to Qt licensing issues
december:
These are just some highlights. If you care for a more complete overview of the happenings around Linux in 1998, LWN has it (I’ve used it as a source for quite a few items here).
