“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…!”