Re: We are getting old

Oh, hello! You could date from the first POSTGRES paper by Stonebraker
(85), or from Jolly Chen & Andrew Yu's Postgres95 releases (95ish) but I
think the best time to date from would be when Marc volunteered to set up
the Postgres CVS repo in April of '96. You could also date from Marc's
tragically concluding there was consensus around PostgreSQL in October of
the same year.

I collected a bunch of this stuff for a Postgres history talk a while back.
Not sure if there is a video but slides are archived here:
https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfeu2017/sessions/session/1621/slides/49/PGCONF.EUAnIllustratedHistoryofPostgreSQL.pdf

-p

On Sun, Mar 7, 2021 at 10:55 PM Ian Lawrence Barwick <barwick(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> 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
>
> --
> EnterpriseDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com
>
>
>

--
Peter van Hardenberg
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."—Kurt Vonnegut