On April 1, 1976, three men signed the founding documents of a company in a Los Altos garage: Steven Paul Jobs, Stephen Gary Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. Frightened by the risk, Wayne sold his 10% for US$ 800 just twelve days later — a stake that would be worth tens of billions. Thirty-five years … Read more
On April 4, 1975, in a room at the Sundowner Hotel on Route 66 in Albuquerque, William Henry Gates III and Paul Allen formalized “Micro-Soft”: 60% for Gates, 40% for Allen, and a BASIC for the Altair 8800 computer as their only product. Fifty years later, Microsoft is worth trillions and runs more Linux than … Read more
On February 24, 2009, his birthday as he turned 33, Jan Borysovych Koum registered WhatsApp Inc. in California. The app did not yet exist. The name was a play on “what’s up.” Five years later, he signed the sale to Facebook — around US$ 19.3 billion — in the white building in Mountain … Read more
In 2002, Mischa Peters of High5! released a PHP application so he would not have to edit MySQL by hand: virtual domains, mailboxes, and aliases. He called it PostfixAdmin. GPL. Postfix delivered the mail; it lacked a service counter. Twenty-four years later, PostfixAdmin 4.0.5 (July 5, 2026) is still that counter — now with TOTP, app passwords, DKIM, … Read more
On April 7, 2001, Alexei Vladishev released Zabbix under the GPL. It was an internal tool; it became a project. Stable version 1.0 came only on March 23, 2004. In April 2005, SIA Zabbix was founded in Riga, Latvia. Twenty-one years as a company (anniversary on April 12, 2025), twenty-five … Read more
On March 19, 2005, NagiosQL arrived on SourceForge. Martin of wizonet put on the web what Nagios administrators had been doing in vim: host, service, contact, timeperiod, template — in a form, in MySQL, with a button to write to disk and another to run nagios -v. Twenty-one years later, version 3.5.0 still … Read more
On March 14, 1999, Ethan Galstad released NetSaint 0.0.1. He thought about a dozen people would care. It pinged hosts, ran plugins, sent email and pager alerts when a service went down — and again when it recovered. In 2002, the name became Nagios: “Nagios Ain’t Gonna Insist On Sainthood,” hagios = saint, … Read more
On October 8, 2011, Dmitriy Zaporozhets made GitLab’s first commit. His home in Ukraine had no running water; the community well was the smaller problem — what he lacked was a Git tool he could change. Ruby on Rails, inspired by GitWeb, built with Valeriy Sizov. Fifteen years later, GitLab 19.3.1 … Read more
In July 2002, a Finnish developer who had already written irssi released an IMAP server designed to be neither Courier nor UW. He called it Dovecot — a shelter for pigeons. Five years later, on April 13, 2007, version 1.0.0 arrived. Timo Sirainen noted: “almost five years, but it is ready.” Twenty-four … Read more
In 1997, Wietse Venema at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center began writing an MTA so he would not have to live with Sendmail. On December 14, 1998, the code was released. It was called VMailer, then IBM Secure Mailer, then Postfix — “post” for mail, “fix” for repair. Twenty-eight years later, Postfix … Read more
