Matthias Ettrich: The KDE-Man! Mar 18, 2008, 18 :45 UTC (4 Talkback[s]) (3868 reads) (Other stories by Swapnil Bhartiya)
"How did KDE begin?
ME: KDE's history started with a posting of mine in various Linux and X11-related newsgroups almost 12 years ago in October 1996. We quickly assembled 40 or so developers and started hacking together. Since then, the project has grown a lot, both in terms of contributors and in terms of users. And most certainly in terms of the number of applications and lines of source code.
"The time was just right in 1996. Linux was popular enough that it had plenty of developers and users who were interested in graphical user interfaces, as opposed to the early console-only hackers, as Microsoft shocked the Free Software world with Windows 95. It may sound unbelievable, but back then, many hackers thought something like Windows 95 could never be matched with Free Software. How wrong they were...!"
