[Xapian-discuss] Happy 5th Birthday Xapian!

[Olly Betts]

Looking back at the CVS tree, the oldest code checkin I can find was on
September 13th 1999, when it was just Richard and me working in an attic
office above the atrium of St John's Innovation Centre (in Cambridge, UK):

http://cvs.xapian.org/xapian/xapian-core/common/database.h?rev=1.1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

This was before BrightStation released the code under the GPL.  At that
point the project was called "Object Muscat", and was being written as
a replacement for the aging Muscat 3.6 system (mostly written in BCPL!)

The CVS comment suggests that we'd been working on the code for a little
before this, so the date probably isn't quite correct.  I doubt it's out
by more than a few weeks though.

Searching Google groups finds a freshmeat release announcement for
"OpenMuscat 0.1.0 - High performance probabalistic search engine
library." on 2000/03/10 - this was probably the first Open Source
release:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8abeu4%24i68%241%40linux339.dn.net

That's the date of the freshmeat announcement though - the release was
probably a little before that.

Cheers,
    Olly