Happy Birthday, Opera!

Time is a relative thing. That's what 15 years in a person's life? This is childhood and adolescence, the very first stages of life, in general, the very beginning. But for a software company, the same age is an entire era. How the computer world has changed over the years is hard to imagine. Remember which computers were just a half decades ago. Now even the middling smartphone significantly exceeds the 1995 model desktop in terms of its hardware characteristics. And what the application software is doing on the monitors today is not thought of in those days even in perspective. What can I say - who even held ordinary floppy disks in their hands? No, not neat plastic 3.5 inch, but 5.25 "monsters packed in a black cardboard envelope with a sticker as a write-guard ...


Yes, Opera Software came into being exactly 15 years ago - a year after writing the first (then inaccessible to the general public) version of the Opera browser. It has already begun traditionally for many well-known software companies today - two talented friends decided to change the world. Geir Ivarsa, who unfortunately left this world 4 years ago, whose ideas became the program for the development of the Norwegian browser for many years to come, and Jon von Tachner, who was 10 years younger than Geira, who has the talent to write excellent code in almost any language and is able to infect with his own non-standard ideas of all others. It looked like the first office of the company - you can imagine from this old photograph (on the left - Yon, on the right - Geir). 8 square meters, two computers. The company began with a registered capital of 50'000 Norwegian kroner (something around 6'000 Euro at the current exchange rate) and rented an office in the same office building not far from the center of Oslo, as now - the neighbors were very different, up to the type massage "salon floor below.

Jon once said that one of the most vivid memories of that time was the release of the first public version of the Opera browser. The joy of its authors knew no bounds when the number of downloads grew to fantastic numbers for them at that time - thirty copies a day! For 15 years, much has changed. Now Opera Software’s headquarters has occupied almost completely four of the five floors of that very office building (except for the first floors there are shops and services) and several million versions of Opera browsers are downloaded daily from our servers. Fifteen offices have been opened, including in Russia, and the number of employees already exceeds 750 people from 50 countries of the world. And personally, I am very pleased that for the last 7.5 years my life and work have been closely associated with this unusual and friendly company. Happy birthday, Opera, still be an inexhaustible source of new ideas and solutions that can make the world even better.