A Brief Timeline of Python

The development of Python occurred at a time when many other dynamic (and open-source) programming languages such as Tcl, Perl, and (much later) Ruby were also being actively developed and gaining popularity. To help put Python in its proper historical perspective, the following list shows the release history of Python. The earliest dates are approximate as I didn't consistently record all events:

Release Date Version

December, 1989 Implementation started

1990 Internal releases at CWI

February 20, 1991 0.9.0 (released to alt.sources)

February, 1991 0.9.1

Autumn, 1991 0.9.2

December 24, 1991 0.9.4

January 2, 1992 0.9.5 (Macintosh only)

April 6, 1992 0.9.6

Unknown, 1992 0.9.7beta

January 9, 1993 0.9.8

July 29, 1993 0.9.9

January 26, 1994 1.0.0

February 15, 1994 1.0.2

May 4, 1994 1.0.3

July 14, 1994 1.0.4

October 11, 1994 1.1

November 10, 1994 1.1.1

April 13, 1995 1.2

October 13, 1995 1.3

October 25, 1996 1.4

January 3, 1998 1.5

October 31, 1998 1.5.1

April 13, 1999 1.5.2

September 5, 2000 1.6

October 16, 2000 2.0

April 17, 2001 2.1

December 21, 2001 2.2

July 29, 2003 2.3

November 30, 2004 2.4

September 16, 2006 2.5

October 1, 2008 2.6

December 3, 2008 3.0

I've added hyperlinks to the releases that are still being advertised on python.org at this time. Note that many releases were followed by several micro-releases, e.g. 2.0.1; I haven't bothered to include these in the table as otherwise it would become too long. Source tarball of very old releases are also still accessible, here: http://www.python.org/ftp/python/src/. Various ancient binary releases and other historical artefacts can still be found by going one level up from there.