How time was going on...
Today Blanka looked back at early time of NetBeans and make a nice sumup of our favorite IDE history:
"NetBeans celebrates 10 years, so this is good time to look back and remind us how NetBeans change in time.
Ten years later... 
NetBeans was born long time ago in Czech Republic in year 1996 as a student project Xelfi in Charles University. In a sort time late Ing. R. Staněk found this project in the Internet and established new companies call Netbeans. This company developed Netbeans version 2.0 and 2.1. In that years Sun started to be concerned with this Czech company and this interest finished with connection of this company to Sun Microsystems in 1999 In that time NetBeans was in version 3.0. From version 3.1 you can find the specifications on the Netbeans web sites (http://www.netbeans.org/community/index.html). Tyhis was great success for Sun, but even greater for users and community. In 2000 Sun changed NetBeans to Open Source and invested lot of time and money to this project. But thanks to this NetBeans started to grow up and community started to get involved in NetBeans. Today community is essential part of development of NetBeans. Thanks to lot of people all over the world NetBeans can improve itself or lot of user can use NetBeans in their natural language etc.
So big thank to people that spend their free time with NetBeans to make it better.
If you want to see how time was going on with NetBeans layout watch this video:
http://www.netbeans.org/birthday/historic-screenshots.html ."
Posted at 10:18AM Dec 03, 2008 by Jeremie Bertolino in NetBeans | Comments[3]
Hi,
it's nice summary, good job Blanka.
Happy birthday NetBeans! :-) (better late than never ;)
NetBeans gets better and better! I'm proud that it was born on Charles University (note: I graduated from C.U.) I think it's most successful C.U. student's software project. We created our student's software project in NetBeans too, aswell as my diploma thesis and now I created a lot of larger work projects in NetBeans... NetBeans changed my life - positively :-) Coding in Java is much better using NetBeans.
Thanks for this incredible IDE and keep up the good work! :-)
Best regards,
Luky
Posted by Lukas Stehlik on December 03, 2008 at 12:48 PM CET #
Any idea why it was called "Xelfi"? Does that mean something in Czech?
Posted by melanie gao on December 03, 2008 at 02:42 PM CET #
Hi Melanie,
"Xelfi" is not a czech word. NetBeans was originally called Xelfi because the main goal from early beginning (1995) was to create Delphi-like C++ IDE for X Window System. "ph" letters are pronounced as "f" in czech. There was no IDE like Borland Delphi (Windows) for X Window System (Unix/Linux) users - only gcc, vi editor, etc. Later (1996), Xelfi ("Delfi for X-Windows") developers luckily switched to the fresh new Java language and life of the multiplatform visual development environment for Java created in Java could start :-)
Best regards,
Luky
Posted by Lukas Stehlik on December 03, 2008 at 04:04 PM CET #