Timeline of free and open-source software
Date Project Event Achievements
1982 TeX Originally written by Donald Knuth in 1978 , the new version of TeX was rewritten from scratch and was published in 1982 One of the longest continuously-developed open source projects
1983 , September GNU Project Announced by Richard Stallman on Usenet as a project to create a Free Unix Became the standard userland for Linux ( c. 1991 ) ; USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ( 2001 )
1984 X Window System X originated at MIT in 1984 . The current protocol version , X11 , appeared in September 1987 . The X.Org Foundation now leads the X project , with the current reference implementation , X.org Server , available as free software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses Most popular windowing system implementation for desktop Linux and all Unix operating systems , excluding Mac OS X
1985 Free Software Foundation Founded by Richard Stallman to support Free Software projects and issue revisions to key software licenses , notably the GPL Prix Ars Electronica ( 2005 )
1987 GCC Written by Richard Stallman with contributions from others as the C compiler for the GNU Project . Later the project would be known as the GNU Compiler Collection
1987 Perl Perl , the dynamic programming language was created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987
1980s
This article presents a timeline of events related to popular free/open-source software. For a narrative explaining the overall development, see the related history of free and open-source software. The Achievements column documents achievements a project attained at some point in time (not necessarily when it was first released).