HISTORY

This is a brief history of the Phoenix conferencing system.

Initial development of the system began on November 30, 1992.  Phoenix
was finally released (under the Q Public License) on its ninth birthday,
November 30, 2001.  Unreleased versions have run as a production service
(on a private host computer) since March 5, 1993 or earlier.

To date, all of the source code has been written by the original author,
Deven T. Corzine <deven@ties.org>.  Due to a rather draconian Intellectual
Property agreement, no development work occurred on this codebase between
July 23, 1996 and March 10, 2000.

During early development, Phoenix was simply called "conf" for lack of
any real name.  Initial development was in C, from November 30, 1992 until
April 8, 1993.  (It was first placed under RCS control on March 5, 1993.)
After that, the codebase was ported to C++ and redesigned as a series of
object-oriended classes.  This redesign was complex, and kept the codebase
in disarray until the first stable C++ version was finally checked into RCS
on December 8, 1993.  At this point, the C version of the server was retired
and the production server was upgraded to the C++ codebase.  "Conf" was
renamed to "Phoenix" on April 21, 1994.

The name was changed to "Gangplank" to coincide with the Open Source release
on November 30, 2001, in large part because the domain "gangplank.org" was
available.  A 1.x version number was used for the initial Gangplank release
because there was already long history under the "conf" and "Phoenix" names,
which could be viewed as (unreleased) 0.x versions.

The final Gangplank release was version 1.0.0.beta.11 (September 18, 2003).
After some occasional development over the next few years, the codebase was
untouched for a decade until December 25, 2018, when the author refactored
the original 1994 smart pointer code to work correctly with GCC 4.8.3.

This was followed by over 2 years of on-and-off work to reconstruct the
entire history of the codebase on GitHub from old backups, RCS files and
CVS files, including the previously-unreleased original development history.

After the complete history was converted to Git, the code was cleaned up to
compile cleanly with GCC 9.3.0 and updated Autotools files, renamed from
"Gangplank" back to "Phoenix" and relicensed under the MIT license before
finally releasing Phoenix 1.0.0 on July 28, 2021.