Qt Software History
I think that this company is well known to many, but not everyone knows how it all began. I would like to post here a small piece of the story of this worthy respect for the company. By the way, the case with Qt once again confirms the proposition that everything starts small, you just have to be confident of success and, of course, do something well :)
Qt development tools first became publicly available in May 1995. Qt was originally developed by Haarward Nord (executive director) and Irik Chamb-Ing (president), who met at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim.
When Haarward was attracted by a Swedish company to develop an interface in C ++, he began to show interest in developing a graphical user interface. And two years later (in the summer of 1990), Haarward and Irik worked together on developing C ++ applications for ultrasound image databases. This system was supposed to provide a graphical user interface on Unix, Macintosh, Windows systems. One summer, two programmers went outside to sunbathe, and when they sat down on a park bench, Haarvard said: “We need an object-oriented display system.” The ensuing discussion became the intellectual basis of the object-oriented inter-platform system for developing a graphical user interface, which they soon began to create.
In 1991, Haarvard began writing classes that actually formed Qt, and design decisions were made jointly with Irik. The following year, Iriku came up with the idea of ​​“signals and slots,” a simple but powerful GUI programming paradigm, which is currently borrowed by several other tools. Haarward took this idea with delight and implemented it. By 1993, Haarward and Irik had developed the first Qt graphics core and were able to create their own widgets. And at the end of this year, Haarvard proposed to jointly do business and build "the world's best development tools for C ++ graphical user interface."
But the beginning of 1994 did not bode well when two young programmers were going to enter the established market, having neither customers, nor a finished product, nor money. Fortunately, the wives of both had a job and could support their husbands for two years, which, as Ayrik and Haarvard believed, would be enough to develop a software product that allows you to start making money.
The letter “Q” was chosen as a prefix for the classes, because this letter had a beautiful outline in the Emacs font that Haarward used. The letter "t" was added, meaning "toolkit" (toolkit). The company was registered on March 4, 1994 and at first was called Quasar Technologies, then Troll Tech, then Trolltech, and now just Qt Software after Nokia purchased the company.
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In April 1995, through the mediation of a university professor familiar with Haarvard, the Norwegian company Metis entered into a contract with them to develop software based on Qt. At about the same time, Trolltech recruited Arnta Guldbransen, who, during his six years at this company, thought out and implemented the original documentation system, and also made some contribution to the Qt program code.
On May 20, 1995, Qt 0.90 was installed on sunsite.unc.edu. Six days later, the release of this version was announced on comp.os.linux.announce. This was the first public version of Qt. Qt could be used in the development of both Windows and Unix, and the programming interface was the same on both platforms. From the first day, two licenses were provided for Qt: a commercial license was intended for commercial development, and a freeware version was intended for development of Open-source projects. The contract with Metis kept the company afloat, although for a long 10 months no commercial Qt license was sold.
In March 1996, the European Space Research Authority became the second customer of Qt, which acquired ten commercial licenses. Irik and Haarvard, who believe in luck, recruited another developer. Qt 0.97 was released at the end of May, and on September 24, 1996, Qt 1.0 was released. By the end of this year, the Qt 1.1 version was released; eight customers - all from different countries - acquired a total of 18 licenses. This year, the KDE project was also launched by Matthias Ettrich.
The decision made by Mattias to use Qt to build KDE helped Qt to become the de facto standard for developing a C ++ graphical user interface on a Linux system. Matthias joined Trolltech in 1998, and the last significant Qt version of the first release, 1.40, appeared in September of the same year. Qt 2 had a new open source license - the Q Public License (QPL), which met the Open Source Definition. In August 1999, Qt won the Linux World magazine award for best library or tool. At about the same time, Trolltech Pty Ltd (Australia) was formed.
Qt 3.0 was released in 2001. Qt now worked on Windows, Mac Os X, Unix systems. Qt 3.0 contained 42 new classes, and the volume of its program code exceeded 500,000 lines. Qt 3 was an important step forward compared to Qt 2, which, in particular, significantly improved support for Unicode localization and encoding, introduced completely new widgets for viewing and editing text and a class of regular expressions similar to the Perl languages ​​used. Qt 3.0 was awarded the Software Development Times award in the High Productivity category in 2002.
In the summer of 2005, Qt 4.0 was released. With about 500 classes and more than 9000 functions, Qt 4 turned out to be more and richer than any previous version; it was split into several libraries so that developers could use only the parts of Qt they needed. Qt 4 is a big step up from previous versions; it contains a completely new set of efficient and easy-to-use container classes, improved model / view architects functionality, fast and flexible 2D graphics framework and powerful classes for viewing and editing Unicode text, not to mention thousands of small improvements across the entire spectrum of classes Qt. Qt 4 is the first version of Qt available on all supported platforms for both commercial development and open source development.
Since the company was founded, Qt’s popularity has grown steadily, and it continues to grow today. This success is a reflection of the quality of Qt, and the pleasure that the developer receives when using it. Over the past decade, Qt has evolved from a “secret” software product, known only to a group of professionals, into a product that is used throughout the world by thousands of commercial customers and tens of thousands of open-source application developers.
The story is taken from the book Blanchett and Summerfield "Qt4: GUI programming in C ++".
I hope that now you have made up an idea of ​​what Qt is, even if you did not know anything about it. Thanks for attention.
How it all began?
Qt development tools first became publicly available in May 1995. Qt was originally developed by Haarward Nord (executive director) and Irik Chamb-Ing (president), who met at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim.
When Haarward was attracted by a Swedish company to develop an interface in C ++, he began to show interest in developing a graphical user interface. And two years later (in the summer of 1990), Haarward and Irik worked together on developing C ++ applications for ultrasound image databases. This system was supposed to provide a graphical user interface on Unix, Macintosh, Windows systems. One summer, two programmers went outside to sunbathe, and when they sat down on a park bench, Haarvard said: “We need an object-oriented display system.” The ensuing discussion became the intellectual basis of the object-oriented inter-platform system for developing a graphical user interface, which they soon began to create.
In 1991, Haarvard began writing classes that actually formed Qt, and design decisions were made jointly with Irik. The following year, Iriku came up with the idea of ​​“signals and slots,” a simple but powerful GUI programming paradigm, which is currently borrowed by several other tools. Haarward took this idea with delight and implemented it. By 1993, Haarward and Irik had developed the first Qt graphics core and were able to create their own widgets. And at the end of this year, Haarvard proposed to jointly do business and build "the world's best development tools for C ++ graphical user interface."
But the beginning of 1994 did not bode well when two young programmers were going to enter the established market, having neither customers, nor a finished product, nor money. Fortunately, the wives of both had a job and could support their husbands for two years, which, as Ayrik and Haarvard believed, would be enough to develop a software product that allows you to start making money.
Title history
The letter “Q” was chosen as a prefix for the classes, because this letter had a beautiful outline in the Emacs font that Haarward used. The letter "t" was added, meaning "toolkit" (toolkit). The company was registered on March 4, 1994 and at first was called Quasar Technologies, then Troll Tech, then Trolltech, and now just Qt Software after Nokia purchased the company.
')
How did things develop?
In April 1995, through the mediation of a university professor familiar with Haarvard, the Norwegian company Metis entered into a contract with them to develop software based on Qt. At about the same time, Trolltech recruited Arnta Guldbransen, who, during his six years at this company, thought out and implemented the original documentation system, and also made some contribution to the Qt program code.
On May 20, 1995, Qt 0.90 was installed on sunsite.unc.edu. Six days later, the release of this version was announced on comp.os.linux.announce. This was the first public version of Qt. Qt could be used in the development of both Windows and Unix, and the programming interface was the same on both platforms. From the first day, two licenses were provided for Qt: a commercial license was intended for commercial development, and a freeware version was intended for development of Open-source projects. The contract with Metis kept the company afloat, although for a long 10 months no commercial Qt license was sold.
In March 1996, the European Space Research Authority became the second customer of Qt, which acquired ten commercial licenses. Irik and Haarvard, who believe in luck, recruited another developer. Qt 0.97 was released at the end of May, and on September 24, 1996, Qt 1.0 was released. By the end of this year, the Qt 1.1 version was released; eight customers - all from different countries - acquired a total of 18 licenses. This year, the KDE project was also launched by Matthias Ettrich.
The decision made by Mattias to use Qt to build KDE helped Qt to become the de facto standard for developing a C ++ graphical user interface on a Linux system. Matthias joined Trolltech in 1998, and the last significant Qt version of the first release, 1.40, appeared in September of the same year. Qt 2 had a new open source license - the Q Public License (QPL), which met the Open Source Definition. In August 1999, Qt won the Linux World magazine award for best library or tool. At about the same time, Trolltech Pty Ltd (Australia) was formed.
Qt 3.0 was released in 2001. Qt now worked on Windows, Mac Os X, Unix systems. Qt 3.0 contained 42 new classes, and the volume of its program code exceeded 500,000 lines. Qt 3 was an important step forward compared to Qt 2, which, in particular, significantly improved support for Unicode localization and encoding, introduced completely new widgets for viewing and editing text and a class of regular expressions similar to the Perl languages ​​used. Qt 3.0 was awarded the Software Development Times award in the High Productivity category in 2002.
In the summer of 2005, Qt 4.0 was released. With about 500 classes and more than 9000 functions, Qt 4 turned out to be more and richer than any previous version; it was split into several libraries so that developers could use only the parts of Qt they needed. Qt 4 is a big step up from previous versions; it contains a completely new set of efficient and easy-to-use container classes, improved model / view architects functionality, fast and flexible 2D graphics framework and powerful classes for viewing and editing Unicode text, not to mention thousands of small improvements across the entire spectrum of classes Qt. Qt 4 is the first version of Qt available on all supported platforms for both commercial development and open source development.
Conclusion
Since the company was founded, Qt’s popularity has grown steadily, and it continues to grow today. This success is a reflection of the quality of Qt, and the pleasure that the developer receives when using it. Over the past decade, Qt has evolved from a “secret” software product, known only to a group of professionals, into a product that is used throughout the world by thousands of commercial customers and tens of thousands of open-source application developers.
The story is taken from the book Blanchett and Summerfield "Qt4: GUI programming in C ++".
I hope that now you have made up an idea of ​​what Qt is, even if you did not know anything about it. Thanks for attention.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/45764/
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