Stephen Gary Wozniak was born in San Jose on August 11, 1950. He designed the Apple I alone, for free, to impress his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club. Jobs saw the business opportunity. Almost fifty years later, at Apple’s 50-year celebration, Woz still receives the spotlight — and, he says, a … Read more
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
