To: Ferg From: Matt Welsh Reply-To: Matt Welsh Subject: Re: LDP history Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 23:32:49 -0700 Hi Greg, Yes - I absolutely remember you. Thanks for your work to help revive the LDP -- it looks like things are going really well now. The history of the LDP is a pretty murky memory these days. The information in the O'Reilly interview is about as much as I can remember. Basically it all started with Lars Wirzenius and Michael K. Johnson wanting to develop a canonical set of printed manuals to go with Linux systems (hence our original use of LaTeX, which seems silly now, but HTML and the Web didn't exist then). I worked with them and eventually became one of the "co-founders" of the LDP along with Michael and Lars (it was very informal though). Over Christmas 1992 (New Year's 1993) I wrote the first version of "Linux Installation and Getting Started", a whopping 150 pages or so, and posted it to the newsgroups and the various FTP sites -- sunsite, tsx11.mit.edu, etc. So the Linux Documentation Project was born. I maintained the FTP archives and wrote things like the LDP "Manifesto" and copyright license, both of which I think are still floating around somewhere. At that time I was also maintaining big chunks of the Linux FAQ, which was this enormous, hairy document posted in no fewer than 7 sections to the Linux USENET groups. I don't remember the guy's name who maintained that -- someone from France. (Gee - it's terrible that we don't have more in the way of historic archives from those days.) Since this FAQ was getting to be so large, Ian Jackson (a student at Univ. Cambridge at the time) and I collaborated to do away with it. I started the HOWTO project -- by writing the original Installation, NET, and XFree86 HOWTO documents. Ian rewrote the original FAQ from scratch to be just that --an FAQ. Eventually I put together the Linuxdoc-SGML package (a repackaging of some other tools, including the QWERTZ DTD) and shifted all of the HOWTOs to using that format. It was beautiful: I could generate LaTeX, plain ASCII, and HTML all from one source file. I also moderated the comp.os.linux.announce and c.o.l.answers newsgroups. The latter was created for periodic posting of the various Linux documents including the HOWTOs, FAQ, and infamous "INFO-SHEET" and "META-FAQ" documents, both of which were maintained by Michael K. Johnson (now at Red Hat) for the longest time. The former was a short introduction to Linux, and the latter was a list of Linux informational resources (mailing lists, newsgroups, and FTP sites -- remember, this predated the Web). When the Web first started to happen I developed the first Linux-oriented website (to my knowledge), based at Sunsite. Unsurprisingly it was the Linux Documentation Project website, and was basically a huge list of links for everything related to Linux. It started out as mainly a Web mirror of the contents of the LDP FTP site, but grew to encompass all of the LDP documents, development projects, international web pages, etc. It was THE home of Linux on the web. When "linux.org" was founded a year or more later, it mainly pointed back to my site -- as did most of the other Linux sites put up around that time. Had any of us known how big the Web (or Linux) would turn out to be, we would have been selling advertising and domain names left and right :-) Without doing some digging into my old archives it would be hard to come up with more specifics than this. Most of the activity described above was in the 1992-1994 timeframe. It was quite an exciting time! Let me know if you'd like any more details or clarification on any of the above.