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
11 Comments
Happy happy joy joy to world's favorite 3d program. More success in the coming year and may we have many more wonderful years of Blender 3d. Thanks Ton.
Long way! And something tells me that it's only beginning :) Happy holidays!
hey hey.. The first 20 years! Imagine it 20 years from now!
I was 15 back then.. I was drawing all the time but was far from being the 3D addict I am today.
Wow, that is my birthday also... but in 1959 lol
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.
Unfortunately, it references some other source files, in
/usr/people/trace/
and/usr/people/frank/source/
, without which it cannot build...It would only build on an SGI, IRIX version 5.3 or so. If you really want to give it a try, I also released other code from these days here http://download.blender.org/source/chest/neogeo/
Is this the blender day I asked about, Bart?
No, this is just Blender’s birthday.
OK, just asking. Happy Birthday, Blender! Woo-hoo! I get the day off on Jan. 2!
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!!!