Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

How Blender started, twenty years ago…

11

Screen-Shot-2013-12-27-at-11.05.48

Ton started writing Blender during the holidays of 1993. He found his earliest backups and based on their timestamps, he has announced Blender's birthday to be January 2nd. Next year, Blender will turn 20!

Ton writes:

I’ve managed to find the oldest backup of Blender, a snapshot of the first code I wrote to start a new project to replace the in-house tool “Traces”.

This started in the Christmas / New Year holidays of 1993, and with the first code working around new-year’s day.

The backup is from January 8, 1994.

Link

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

11 Comments

  1. I love that screenshot, one small step for a man, one giant leap for 3d! I remember being a demo artist for StrataVision3d at MacWorld in January of 1994, never dreaming that Blender was percolating a continent away.

  2. Lawrence D’Oliveiro on

    Unfortunately, it references some other source files, in /usr/people/trace/ and /usr/people/frank/source/, without which it cannot build...

  3. Are there any copies of the original (compiled!) blender (traces) floating out around there? It would be neat to try and run and see how primitive/awesome it is!!!

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×