So a few days back HAIKU celebrated it's birthday and 10 years of existence. Though abit late I decided to write a short recap of these years of development and present the main moments that made the os what it is today.
So without further ado jump in the DeLorean and let's begin our travels through time and space.
The day is the 18th , the month is August and the year is 2001. The world for some reason still hasn't ended.
On a probably sunny day of Saturday , while Be Inc. is rolling in it's death bed and Palm is sizing up it's meal , we see the first light o hope in the form of the opening of the OpenBeOs mailing list with this post.
It marks the birth of what is to become HAIKU and the lay out of the characteristics the new os will contain.
And so the work begins with the planing stage. Debates are held over what license it should be released under, what source code repository to be used and even what kernel the system should be built upon. The very first kernel suggestion being EROS.
21 September 2001
We see the launch of the project's very firs home page : http://open-beos.sourceforge.net , which now redirect to the HAIKU site .
The project will also adopt a much less restrictive or intimidating mit license , that facilitates the possibility for the code to be used in commercial products.
In 2002 we will see the first releases coming from the project. On april 29 2002 we see the OpenBeOS app_server prototype 5 , the first one capable of drawing windows.
Also in this year we see the first release of OpenBeOS , not as s standalone system but rather as an update to BeOS 5.0.3 in which several components were replaced with open source counterparts.
The year is 2003 and Michael Phipps founds Haiku Inc. , a non-profit organization that is meant to support the project. It is based in Rochester, New York.
We now jump into the future some more. It's 2004 and OpenBeOS is still in it's infancy but a threat looms overhead as Palm is pressuring the project to stop infringing on their BeOS trademark. So at that years WalterCon the projects new name is announced , say hello to HAIKU.
The name was chosen to reflect the elegance and simplicity that attracted many to the BeOS platform, and is also a direct reference to the distinctive haiku (as in poetry) error messages found in many of the platforms app's.
Another year has passed and in 2005 , between March and April , HAIKU reaches it's first truly important milestones. The ability to run its first graphical application and it's first web browser , the highly portable Links.
Also later that year , in July , HAIKU is able to run Open Tracker, the BeOS shell that was thankfully open sourced by BeInc. in 2000, prior to their Palm acquisition.
And if you thought that 2005 couldn't get any better , you are so wrong , as this is the year in which we see Axel Dörfler, one of the most prolific Haiku developers, becoming the first full-time paid Haiku developer, working via funds donated by the community. He will be working on CD booting, SMP and other kernel and app_server functionality. His employment continued until December 2005, when the funds ran out.
Welcome to 2006 , jet-packs are still nowhere to be seen but at least HAIKU is now bootable on real hardware and in somewhat of an usable state. Though there are still many problems caused by an yet immature media_server , usb and network stack.
This year the projects fifth birthday is celebrated coupled with the launch of the new website and a competition that will be determine the os's default icon set. We also see the world doing abit of catchup to BeOS as people are starting to realize that single core processors aren't enough anymore :).
27 August 2006
Haiku Bounties is opened. The first official site dedicated to raising funds for implementing new features. Sadly today the site talks about feet fungus in Japanese.
28 November 2006
The smell of Flash is in the air as a port of the open source alternative Gnash is reported. Sadly not even to this day the possibility of Flash on Haiku doesn't exist. All attempts dieing off as fast as they began.
07 December 2006
The network stack is becoming usable as it's now possible to run an IRC chat client.
A day later we see support for Chinese added to the os.
A new year dawns , winter is still outside, it's February 2007, and I'm at home browsing Google Video and I stumble over an Introduction to Haiku OS , this marks the beginning of my fascination with the project.
2007 also marks the first time the project takes part of Google's Summer of Code , an event that has become somewhat a tradition, and since then HAIKU has been a mentor organization every year.
09 May 2007
The FreeBSD network compatibility layer is tacking shape and is a mark of wireless things to come.
A few day's after we also see the publishing of the HAIKU distribution guidelines, something the community dreads to ever be needed.
The year comes to an end, but it doesn't go away silently as we see first proper webkit render
and the birth of Haiku Files.
03 January 2008
Java for Haiku team is formed but nothing happens. A moment that impacted me the most in the present as it's keeping me away from Minecraft on HAIKU.
Major improvements in the system's stability are achieved this year and in April the hole thing goes super nova and the os becomes self-hosting, HAIKU can now be built from HAIKU ( insert Inception joke here )
31 January 2009
The GCC4 port takes places opening up a doorway towards the ability to port new applications.
12 July 2009
Marks the launch of the Wifi stack prototype which is an evolution of HAIKU's FreeBSD compatibility layer. This is also the moment I start considering the os for daily use on my netbooks , but, sadly , the lack of flash support always came up forcing me to drop the idea.
It's September the 14th, 3 days before my birthday and something different is floating in the air , it's the day I get an early gift, HAIKU alpha 1 is released.
And all I have to say to that is Hell YAH ! An amazing accomplishment that took 8 years of hard work to take shape.
27 October 2009
Qt4 gets ported and brings with it support for an ansamble of app's delivering some much needed functionality. Though on the let's say grey side of things, these aren't native applications that can take advantage of everything HAIKU can offer.
02 March 2010
WebPositive takes form , bringing a much needed modern web-browser.
Two months pass an on May the 9th we get a taste of the second HAIKU alpha bringing us a host of new features , out of all my favorite remaining the more mature Wifi support with WEP encryption.
Abit over a year passes and we are down to lucky number 3, alpha number 3 that is , launched on June the 20th. It brings us a fat list of usb printer support , more filesystems to play with and much more. Also this marks the last of the alpha series , the first beta being in the works , and hopefully bringing feature completion.
Here we are today , a decade after it all started and it's still quite sunny outside , but not as bright as HAIKU's futures looks like. This years Google Summer of Code has come to past bringing us a bunch of new goodies , accelerated support for ati graphic boards is in the works , everything is coming together to bring our favorite os to the same level as today's big boys and without the down side of being incredibly slow.
So sorry for the late article folks , and I wish HAIKU another great decade in front of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment