Re: We are getting old

2021年3月8日(月) 15:42 Justin Clift <justin(at)postgresql(dot)org>:
>
> On 2021-03-08 10:32, Tom Lane wrote:
> > "Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org> writes:
> >> On 3/7/21 9:17 AM, Vik Fearing wrote:
> >>> I wouldn't be against just saying "the 80's", perhaps with some
> >>> superfluous neon
> >
> >> Technically, the above falls in the purview of -docs as it's in the
> >> docs
> >> themselves, though we do link to it from pgweb.
> >> To compare, -www[1] says "over 30 years of active development" so we
> >> could certainly increment the decade count.
> >> I'd also be completely for lifting the first two sentences from [1]
> >> and
> >> placing them in the documentation.
> >
> > +1 for removing the year count in both places, as we'll just forget to
> > maintain it.
> >
> > I think referring to "the 1980s" would be fine, but if we can pin it
> > down more that'd be even better. I see the www page specifies "1986";
> > do we have evidence favoring that particular year as the start?
>
> The Wikipedia article for PostgreSQL seems to say 1985:
>
> PostgreSQL evolved from the Ingres project at the University of
> California,
> Berkeley. In 1982, the leader of the Ingres team, Michael Stonebraker,
> left Berkeley to make a proprietary version of Ingres.[13]
>
> He returned to Berkeley in 1985, and began a post-Ingres project to
> address
> the problems with contemporary database systems that had become
> increasingly clear during the early 1980s.
>
> Wikipedia being not-100%-reliable, this is the article it pulls that
> year
> from:
>
> https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/stonebraker_1172121.cfm
>
> Unfortunately, the only mention of "1985" in that document seems to be:
>
> Stonebraker led development of INGRES at Berkeley until 1985,
> supported
> by grant money and the labor of graduate and undergraduate students.
>
> With further reference to PG later on in the document, but without
> really
> seeming to put a clear date to things. :/
>
> Hmmm, don't suppose we can do this the easy way the just look at the
> earliest
> commit date we have? :)

The earliest commit date is July 1996:

https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=d31084e9d1118b25fd16580d9d8c2924b5740dff

Some spelunking here might provide some further clues, maybe there are some
release notes or something squirreled away:

https://dsf.berkeley.edu/oldpost/

Regards

Ian Barwick

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