Joel on Software

Here’s a quick history of the technology behind Joel on Software.

Version one was on Manila, created by Dave Winer. Dave was the one who convinced me to blog, by blogging himself, and by creating what was, I think, the first public blogging platform at editthispage.com. My site was joel.editthispage.com and back in 1999 people thought it was pretty spiffy that you could get your own subdomain like that.

In order to use my own domain, I registered joelonsoftware.com and took an old IBM desktop computer (probably running Windows NT 4.0), shoved it in a closet, and ran my own copy of Manila. The first time Slashdot linked to me it melted down. We upgraded the memory from 256M to 512M and it recovered.

In those days all the cool kids wrote their own blogging platforms. I wrote CityDesk. In what turned out to be a monumentally wrong bet, I thought that

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