The first words of major projects

A big deal starts with a small step. Some student from Peter made a website on his lap. An unknown enthusiast from Finland sent an announcement to the thematic echo conference on Minix. Who can guess what this will lead to?

After many years it is interesting to see how some popular IT projects started.

Linux kernel

August 25, 1991
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA/SwRavCzVE7gJ
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From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.Fi (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
News group: comp.os.minix
Subject: A quick survey about my new operating system.
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.Fi>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

Hello to all those who use minix -

I am doing a (free) operating system (this is just a hobby, not as big and professional as GNU) for 386 (486) AT-clones. This system has been written since April and will be ready soon. I want to get any feedback on things that people like / dislike in minix, since my OS is similar to it (the same file system device (for practical reasons), among other things).

Currently I have ported bash (1.08) and gcc (1.40), and these programs seem to be working. This means that I will get something practical in the next few months, and I want to know what opportunities most people want. Any suggestions are accepted, but I do not promise that I will implement them :-)

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

Ps. Yes - there is no minix code in it, and there will be a multi-threaded FS. The system is NON-ADAPTABLE (uses Intel 386 commands, etc.) and will probably only support AT hard drives, since this is all I have :-(

"In contact with"

December 2, 2006
mat-mex.ru/forum/index.php?showtopic=1014

durov
Newbie
Group: Participants
Messages: 10
Specialty: not specified
Year of entry: 2001
Learning Stage: Graduate
Name: P. Durov
Registration: Saturday, December 02, 2006
Reputation: 0

Topic: Online catalog of students at St. Petersburg State University, opened

Good evening everyone!

For those who do not know: this week an online database of students and graduates of St. Petersburg State University was opened. For 5 days, about 650 people from the university registered, among them more than 40 from math. The site is designed in line with the concept of social networks. I was involved in the creation, a graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy of St. Petersburg State University and my brother, Nikolay Durov, a graduate of the St. Petersburg State University mathex.

Take a look and, if you wish, register:

vkontakte.ru

Please note that when registering, you must specify your real name and surname.

All comments and suggestions, if any, write in this thread.

Bittorrent

July 2, 2001
groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/decentralization/conversations/topics/3160

Bram cohen

Topic: BitTorrent - new P2P application

My new BitTorrent application, now operational, check it here -

bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent

Bram Cohen

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can be solvent.”
- John Maynard Keynes

Facebook

^{Until 2007, the Facebook logo featured a heavily modified Al Pacino face. The author of the photomontage is Mark Zuckerberg’s classmate.}

February 2, 2004
www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register-for-new-facebook-website

Newspaper The Harvard Crimson
Article “Hundreds of people are registered on Facebook. The creator of Facemash is trying to fix its reputation with another online project. ”

“The main feature of the site,” said Zuckerberg, “is that each user is interested in having more of his friends join the network.”

The Zuckerberg website allows users with Harvard University email addresses to upload their photos, personal and academic information. Like the popular Friendster website, which Zuckerberg calls the model for their project, users can search for people according to their interests and create an online network of friends. ”

Google

April 14, 1998 (the presentation of scientific work was held at the Seventh WWW International Conference 1998 in Brisbane, Australia)
infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
{sergey, page@cs.csford.edu
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

“Anatomy of a large-scale hypertext search engine on the web”

In this article, we present Google, the prototype of a large-scale search engine that makes extensive use of structures represented as hypertext. Google is designed to effectively crawl and index the web to produce more satisfactory search results than existing search engines. This prototype with a complete database of texts and hyperlinks of at least 24 million pages is available at google.stanford.edu .

... This paper presents an in-depth description of our large-scale search engine on the web — the first such detailed public description, as far as we know, to date.

Bitcoin

October 31, 2008
article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12588

From: Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshi vistomail.com>
Topic: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
Newsgroup: gmane.comp.encryption.general
Date: 2008-10-31 18:10:00 GMT

I am working on a new electronic money system, completely peering, without a trusted third party.

Scientific work is available here:
www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Main characteristics:

• Double spending is prevented using a peer-to-peer network.
• No mint or other trusted parties.
• Members may be anonymous.
• New coins are made from evidence of work done in the style of Hashcash.
• Proofs of work done to generate new coins also provide the computing power of the network to prevent double spending.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Webmoney

November 20, 1998

The innovative P2P anonymous payment system Webmoney opened on November 20, 1998 and tried to gain trust with bonuses and an affiliate program.

The first thousand registered in the system received 30 WMZ (WM) on her wallet, the first online stores that connected to Webmoney received 100 WMZ each. For each attracted member, users received 3 WMZ.



The names of the authors of the idea and the developers are still unknown, as is the case with Bitcoin.

Wikipedia

January 10, 2001
www.nupedia.com/pipermail/nupedia-l/2001-January/000676.html
( archived copy )

From: Larry Sanger lsanger@nupedia.com
Subject: [Nupedia-l] Let's do a wiki
News group: Nupedia-l
Date: Wed, Jan 10, 2001 12:50:32 -0800

No, this is not a random offer. This is an idea to add a small feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people find the idea undesirable, but I don’t think so.

“Wikis,” pronounced “Wi-ki,” comes from the Polynesian word “Wikiviki,” but it means a VERY open, VERY publicly editable set of web pages. For example, I can create a page called EpistemicCircularity and write anything there. Anyone else (yes, absolutely anyone) can come in and make absolutely any changes in the text that he wishes. (The editing interface is very simple; anyone who is smart enough to write or edit a Nupedia article will be able to master it without any problems). On the page I created, I can link to other pages, and of course anyone can link to mine. The project is advertised and is a public resource. There are several announced offers or rules. The concept seems to work quite well in reality, as you can see here in the original wiki:

c2.com/cgi/wiki

It's funny that now some consider the founder of Wikipedia alone Jimmy Wales, who was against the wiki.

---

The list goes on. Each project began in different ways, but in many cases a single enthusiast stood behind him, whose initiative initially looked dubious. If you know other such examples - please add in the comments.