History of Python

Author of the Python programming language: Guido van Rossum

The basis for the Python language was ABC (Amobea operating system) which similar to BASIC or Pascal. Amoeba was an experimental, microkernel-based distributed operating system developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and others at the Vrije Universiteit. The aim of the Amoeba project was to build a timesharing system.
ABC has some disadvantages:

• not well structured error handling
• monolithic structure

van Rossum took the best features from ABC and built a new language, Python.

van Rossum moved to BeOpen labs, and as the great tradition of all programming tasks, the team “borrowed” from other languages to extend their own. Python 2.0 borrowed from a language called Haskell and acquired eits most important feature: list comprehensions.

Timeline

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