Hi,
Perhaps many of you know that today KDE celebrates 10 years of existence. It was today Matthias Ettrich announced [1] the starting of KDE project on Usenet. Some people in this list surely did read that one then and some later. From what I gather from talking to people, 10 years down the memory lane, some people thought it was the next cool thing and for the love of "hacking" joined the project.
Some days later in October 1996, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, started working on the first KDE class ever - KConfig ( that was the first KDE code as well ). Matthias Ettirch started working kwn at the same time. The first version of kdelibs ( kdelibs-0.0.1 ) was soon released. And guess what there was no svn, no cvs as well . Everything was tarred up and dropped in FTP server at the University of Tübingen. Humble beginnings. IIRC, Taj (Sirtaj Singh Kang) joined the project around those times as well.
Today the KDE ( with 4 MLOC of code) and its libraries talk of a very rich well documented API and a great community. Many of its home grown technologies have been adapted by industry and there is co-operation happening as well in the same areas. Technologies like KIO,KHTML, KParts just make a developers job easy. And then there are loads of applications and upcoming new stuff like Phonon,Solid (with recent commits to the main trunk branch ) and other really cool stuff show a lot of promise.
Have fun. Cheers!
[1] http://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php
Pradeepto