When Was Zope Born?

As far as I'm concerned, Zope was born Saturday, June 8, 1996. This was Jim Fulton's plane trip back from IPC4

Beyond that, Zope (as a unification of previous software) was announced in November 1998 and released in December 1998.

DC had some prior art in the field before IPC4, such as my W3C tech note on the "ILU Requester", technology for making web servers talk CORBA to services. Also, Brian Lloyd had, with someone else here at the time, cooked up an early ORB to handle message dispatch from the web into Python. However, our work was tiny compared to Jim's plane trip back.

I pick the 1996 date because, well, from a marketing perspective it makes Zope look more mature. :^) But that's the best date. Here's "the rest of the story".

Jim joined Digital Creations about a week before IPC4. He had already scheduled to go to IPC4, and I had scheduled to go and teach a CGI class. Instead, I decided to go on vacation and make him teach the class. Slight problem: he had never heard of CGI.

So on the plane ride there he read the CGI spec, some background material, and rewrote my presentation. In the process he decided CGI was broken and needed a bunch of things, primarily object orientation. The "python object publisher" (an ORB) was conceived during the conference and was largely written on the plane ride back. The ORB quickly took over our consulting business. Within a year we added a template system, then a persistent object system, then...

That's the story. So there, we have a birthdate!