discuss: Re: LDP Anniversary]
Subject:
Re: [Fwd: LDP Anniversary]
From:
Paul Jones ####@####.####
Date:
2 May 2002 14:52:36 -0000
Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0205021051310.4944-100000@tribal.metalab.unc.edu>
this will probably help out. looks like december 1992
--- Forwarded mail from Matt Welsh ####@####.####
To: Ferg ####@####.####
From: Matt Welsh ####@####.####
Reply-To: Matt Welsh ####@####.####
Subject: Re: LDP history
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 23:32:49 -0700
Hi Greg,
Yes - I absolutely remember you. Thanks for your work to help revive the
LDP -- it looks like things are going really well now.
The history of the LDP is a pretty murky memory these days. The
information in the O'Reilly interview is about as much as I can remember.
Basically it all started with Lars Wirzenius and Michael K. Johnson
wanting to develop a canonical set of printed manuals to go with Linux
systems (hence our original use of LaTeX, which seems silly now, but HTML
and the Web didn't exist then). I worked with them and eventually became
one of the "co- founders" of the LDP along with Michael and Lars (it was
very informal though). Over Christmas 1992 (New Year's 1993) I wrote the
first version of "Linux Installation and Getting Started", a whopping 150
pages or so, and posted it to the newsgroups and the various FTP sites --
sunsite, tsx11.mit.edu, etc.
So the Linux Documentation Project was born. I maintained the FTP archives
and wrote things like the LDP "Manifesto" and copyright license, both of
which I think are still floating around somewhere.
At that time I was also maintaining big chunks of the Linux FAQ, which was
this enormous, hairy document posted in no fewer than 7 sections to the
Linux USENET groups. I don't remember the guy's name who maintained that
-- someone from France. (Gee - it's terrible that we don't have more in
the way of historic archives from those days.) Since this FAQ was getting
to be so large, Ian Jackson (a student at Univ. Cambridge at the time) and
I collaborated to do away with it. I started the HOWTO project -- by
writing the original Installation, NET, and XFree86 HOWTO documents. Ian
rewrote the original FAQ from scratch to be just that --an FAQ. Eventually
I put together the Linuxdoc-SGML package (a repackaging of some other
tools, including the QWERTZ DTD) and shifted all of the HOWTOs to using
that format. It was beautiful: I could generate LaTeX, plain ASCII, and
HTML all from one source file.
I also moderated the comp.os.linux.announce and c.o.l.answers newsgroups.
The latter was created for periodic posting of the various Linux documents
including the HOWTOs, FAQ, and infamous "INFO-SHEET" and "META-FAQ"
documents, both of which were maintained by Michael K. Johnson (now at Red
Hat) for the longest time. The former was a short introduction to Linux,
and the latter was a list of Linux informational resources (mailing lists,
newsgroups, and FTP sites -- remember, this predated the Web).
When the Web first started to happen I developed the first Linux-oriented
website (to my knowledge), based at Sunsite. Unsurprisingly it was the
Linux Documentation Project website, and was basically a huge list of
links for everything related to Linux. It started out as mainly a Web
mirror of the contents of the LDP FTP site, but grew to encompass all of
the LDP documents, development projects, international web pages, etc. It
was THE home of Linux on the web. When "linux.org" was founded a year or
more later, it mainly pointed back to my site -- as did most of the other
Linux sites put up around that time. Had any of us known how big the Web
(or Linux) would turn out to be, we would have been selling advertising
and domain names left and right :-)
Without doing some digging into my old archives it would be hard to come
up with more specifics than this. Most of the activity described above was
in the 1992-1994 timeframe. It was quite an exciting time!
Let me know if you'd like any more details or clarification on any of the
above.
Thanks, Matt
--- End of forwarded mail from Matt Welsh ####@####.####
==========================================================================
Paul Jones
"Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!"
http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/ at the Site Formerly Known As MetaLab.unc.edu
####@####.#### voice: (919) 962-7600 fax: (919) 962-8071
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