The History of Debian, Part 2
The History of Debian, Part 2
Growth in the new millennium
In late 1999 following the release of Debian 2.1 Slink, Debian managed to get sponsorship from VA Linux, Sun Microsystems, and O’Reilly. In this new arrangement, Debian would be distributed with O’Reilly’s book Learning Debian GNU Linux and would include a coupon for a copy of Star Office from Sun. This bundle sold for $19.95 (about $36.50 in 2024) from VA Linux and in some retail stores. VA Linux also offered Debian as an option on computers sold by them. According to Brian Biles who was the VP of marketing at VA Linux during this time period, “We're getting requests for Debian from customers, but we're also doing this now because we're now in a position to offer support for Debian, to give something back to the open-source community.” The profits from the sale of Debian went to Software in the Public Interest.
On the 15th of May in 2000, the first DebConf, referred to as DebConf0, was announced to be taking place in Bordeaux from the 5th to the 19th of July in 2000. The Free Software Foundation was hosting the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux during the same time frame, which made the coordination easier for many in attendance. This first DebConf was the start of a tradition. Following the election of the Debian project leader each year, Debian users and developers gather to discuss problems and solutions facing the project, to hack on the system, to get to know one another, and to attend workshops furthering their skills and knowledge. I personally find it interesting that Hurd was listed as an important subject for Debian in the announcement of DebConf. The belief that Hurd would soon be a viable kernel was quite real.
Debian 2.2 Potato was released on the 15th of August in 2000 for six architectures (x86, m68k, Alpha, SPARC, PowerPC, ARM) with around thirty nine hundred packages available and kernel version 2.2.16. Around five hundred people contributed to version 2.2. Major advancements included automated network setup, package selection during installation via selecting intended uses, simplified X setup, better internationalization, PAM integration, and better adherence to the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. This release also saw the first availability of an LDAP client/server package for Debian with openldap, and the first availability of SSH for Debian via openssh. With this release, Debian became the largest of all Linux distributions by lines of code with a count coming in at over fifty five million and the number of source packages in the testing repository counting over four thousand.
On the 4th of December in 2000, Hewlett-Packard hired Bruce Perens to help get Linux running PA-RISC. On the 10th of May in 2001, HP announced that they’d be using Debian for their Linux-based products. Martin Fink stated that HP’s Linux systems division hoped to avoid having proprietary software dominate Linux and set standards about which he said “Debian is the best means to that end. Debian is the only distribution that is not under someone's commercial control.” About this move within HP, Perens stated that HP had already begun supplying Debian to customers, that HP would offer support and training for Debian, and that supporting the Linux Standard Base was a priority for HP.
The next release of Debian took quite a while to create. The primary reason for this was issues with the boot floppies. Without working boot floppies, widespread testing could not occur and this in-turn prevented further testing and development of the entire system post install. While waiting for the next release, Debian did ship several updates to 2.2 while Corel sold its Linux division, Stormix went bankrupt, and Progeny ceased development. Additionally, Debian did a considerable amount of internationalization work during this same time frame.
In the 1990s, Nathan Hawkins was working for a small ISP. His employer was using Linux ubiquitously, and Hawkins was the company’s primary system administrator. He also served in a sort of director’s role making the primary decisions around operating systems. Shortly before the release of Red Hat Linux 5, he moved the company to Debian. After becoming familiar with the system and doing some work on it as a contributor, he applied to be a Debian developer and was accepted. Despite his use of Linux and work with it, he had several issues with Linux. First, devfs wasn’t well liked by the Linux kernel developers at the time, and there was no reliable method in Linux for determining which hardware device was identified by any given device node. So, for example, a SCSI device identified as /dev/sda might be either the user’s Seagate disk or the user’s Maxtor disk (although, through applications like fdisk this could easily be sorted, just not for boot). Erroneous assignment could then render a system unable to successfully boot. Hawkins also had issues with SCSI support in general, with volume management, and with kernel regressions in the 2.4 series releases.
By 2001, Hawkins was starting to experiment with FreeBSD which had solutions for all of these problems. What FreeBSD lacked, in Hawkins’ opinion, was a decent package management system which Debian absolutely had. To this end, Hawkins created a chroot environment on FreeBSD, patched dpkg, and began compiling Debian’s packages on the FreeBSD kernel. Early incompatibilities arose with utmp which FreeBSD lacked at the time, shadow passwords, libintl, and wide character support. With this effort in progress, other folks began to work on Debian ports to the NetBSD kernel and to the OpenBSD kernel. From Mathew Garrett’s work on NetBSD, Hawkins borrowed shadow. Garrett then borrowed Hawkin’s work on sysvinit, fakeroot, and utmpx. Following DebConf in 2002, Bruno Haible emailed Hawkins letting him now that he had ported glibc to FreeBSD. This port, however, was incomplete and incompatible with FreeBSD’s system headers. Unlike Linux where Linux kernel headers ship with the kernel and libc headers ship with glibc, FreeBSD develops and packages the kernel, libc, and core system as a single unit. Further, the resulting system had neither working DNS resolution nor working threads. Despite all of this, he kept on. He did eventually iron out most of the issues with FreeBSD libc and the Debian userland, but Robert Millan, who’d done work on the Hurd port, kept working on glibc and FreeBSD kernel compatibility and headers. In the end, all of this work became Debian GNU/kFreeBSD which saw development and support until July of 2023. Hawkins reports that around this time, the debian-devel mailing list wasn’t to his liking. He says that there were many flame wars, general hostility to non-Linux ports, and that due to these he felt Debian GNU/kFreeBSD would never become a production-ready system. He retired from Debian shortly thereafter.
Debian 3.0 Woody was released on the 19th of July in 2002. This release supported Intel i386, Motorola 68000, Alpha, SPARC, PowerPC, ARM, PA-RISC, Itanium, MIPS big endian, MIPS little endian, and IBM S/390. It was comprised of over eighty five hundred packages maintained by over nine hundred Debian contributors, and was the first Debian release to offer a DVD image. Woody supported both a 2.2 kernel and a 2.4 kernel, and supported both ext3 and reiserfs filesystems. This was the first Debian release to have cryptographic software in the main distribution (installed with the OS as opposed to being offered in repositories) with the likes of SSH, GPG, and SSL. Debian Woody also saw the first introduction of automatic build-dependency handling to better automate the building of packages from source. It offered package pinning in apt, and the support of aptitude to make package selection easier.
Work began on Debian 3.1 Sarge as soon as Woody was in testing. One would believe that Sarge would then swiftly be released, but this wasn’t how things went… at all. On the morning of the 20th of November in 2002, the University of Twente’s Network Operations Center caught fire along with another nearby building. They were burnt to the ground. A twenty six year old employee of the university was arrested and subsequently confessed to having started the fire. Servers at this location had been hosting Debian’s security repository. Debian recovered from this, but then Debian’s servers were the victims of an intrusion. The attackers exploited a kernel vulnerability that required local access via the use of a stolen password. This required quite a bit of work to ensure that the distribution to be shipped would be free of any malicious code.
After three years of work, disaster, and recovery, the Debian Project released Debian GNU/Linux version 3.1 Sarge on the 6th of June in 2005 for Alpha, ARM, PA-RISC, i386, IA64, m68k, MIPS little endian, MIPS big endian, PowerPC, S/390. and SPARC. An unofficial port to AMD64 was also available. This version featured a new system installer with automatic hardware detection and unattended installation capabilities. All of the work on internationalization yielded a system that was available in thirty languages. This release also featured support for installation from a USB disk. Debian Sarge was the first release offering OpenOffice. This release also saw support arrive for RAID, XFS, and LVM in the installer. Sarge shipped with Linux kernel 2.4.27. By this point, the number of contributors was large enough to simply say that Debian was a global effort.
Following the installation of Debian 3.1, on first boot, the user is prompted to install more packages depending upon the intended use of the system. If the machine has a network connection, these packages can be installed either over the internet or from a local network repository. CDs/DVDs are also an option. For this example, I’ve chosen to use the DVD as this install is occurring on a 486 DX4 with an NE2000 network adapter (16 bit ISA).
While the Debian Project was busy building Sarge, Mark Shuttleworth was busy building a company called Canonical that shipped a product called Ubuntu Linux. Shuttleworth was formerly the maintainer of Debian’s Apache web server package, the founder of Thawte consulting (sold to VeriSign), and the founder of HBD Venture Capital. He gained some fame on the 25th of April in 2002 when he was the second self-funded space tourist and the first South African to venture into space. On the Ubuntu website in 2004, Canonical stated that “Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning humanity to others.” The word and the philosophy around it do indeed stem from the Nguni people, but with varying meanings depending upon which Bantu language one is studying. Ubuntu’s critics commonly rephrase this marketing as “an ancient African word meaning cannot-configure-Debian.” Ubuntu’s first release was version 4.10 Warty Warthog on the 20th of October in 2004 for AMD64, i386, and PowerPC.
The major difference between these Debian and Ubuntu at the time of Ubuntu’s origin was in post-install setup. In Ubuntu, no root user password was setup, and sudo was instead included in the base install. Likewise, with Ubuntu, there was no need to explicitly install a desktop environment or any other package to get to a usable desktop, all of that is automatically installed and configured after creating a user account. In both cases, I’d forgotten just how long the hotplug system took during boot…
As Ubuntu began, it made a commitment to its userbase that it would always be free of charge, maintain a high level of accessibility, maintain high quality internationalization support, be updated regularly with releases made every six months, and that it would be firmly committed to open source software development principles. From the beginning, Ubuntu was funded by Canonical which provided technical support and professional services for Ubuntu’s business users.
Ian Murdock was especially critical of Ubuntu, stating:
If anything, Ubuntu’s popularity is a net negative for Debian. It’s diverged so far from Sarge that packages built for Ubuntu often don’t work on Sarge. And given the momentum behind Ubuntu, more and more packages are being built like this. The result is a potential compatibility nightmare.
He further elaborated:
Mark, this doesn’t end well. If you want a glimpse of what will happen, take a look at the RPM world, where software developers and ISVs have to build a different RPM for every RPM-based distro (either that, or the ISVs have to choose the one or two most popular RPM-based distros to the exclusion of all others–or perhaps that’s what you have in mind?).
Here’s a suggestion on how we can avert the crisis before it becomes one: Provide a Debian compatibility runtime and development environment for Ubuntu, and make the development environment the default environment. That way, when developers build packages on Ubuntu, they can be installed as-is on Debian as well. Provide a Ubuntu-specific development environment too, so developers can take advantage of Ubuntu-specific features that aren’t in Debian yet, but only use those features when you absolutely must. Everyone wins.
If you’re really interested in joining forces with UserLinux, this would be a great start. I’m sure Bruce would agree. You’d have my interest as well.
What he was talking about was a rather big issue of the time. Mandriva, TurboLinux, Red Hat, SuSE, and several other distributions all used RPMs for packaging, but none of these RPMs built for one distribution would work on any other. As a result, if one were releasing software as an RPM, he/she would then need to specify for which distribution(s) the RPM was intended. Otherwise, the developer would be inundated with complaints of the RPM not working. There were already user-friendly Debian derivatives (Linspire, Xandros {formerly Corel}, MEPIS, KNOPPIX) and their packages were compatible with Debian’s. Yet, this incompatibility wasn’t at all similar to the issue in RPMs. Debian moves slowly, but Debian has a reputation to this day of being a rock solid distribution. As a result of rigorous standards, by the time a Debian release is considered stable, it isn’t exactly representative of the state of the Linux world. For Canonical, the latest hardware support and the latest graphical environments were essential, and Ubuntu therefore branched from Sid (Debian unstable). In this sense, Ubuntu was (during this time period) a pre-configured and patched version of Debian Sid that standardized on a set of desktop packages (GNOME, Firefox, Evolution, etc) and offered commercial support. This release wasn’t compatible with the current Debian stable release (Sarge) as everything in Ubuntu was several package versions ahead. For his part, Murdock admitted this as the origin of the issue, and offered the idea (in different words) of backporting as a solution. His advice to Canonical wasn’t immediately heeded.
In February of 2006, Mike Connor wrote to the Debian bug tracker on behalf of the Mozilla Corporation that Debian’s usage of the Firefox name, for which Mozilla held the trademark, wasn’t in keeping with Mozilla’s wishes and that the further use of the name was disallowed. Further, as Debian’s stable releases are often comprised of more mature software, patches are often applied for security and/or compatibility. According to Mozilla, all patches would need to be approved before inclusion. As a result of this dispute and its implications, the Debian Project initiated a rebranding effort of all of Mozilla’s applications. Mozilla SeaMonkey (formerly the Mozilla Suite) became Iceape, Thunderbird became Icedove, Sunbird became Iceowl, and Firefox became Iceweasel.
As usual for the Debian Project, work continued despite surrounding conditions. AMD64 started to become more common in the middle of the 2000s, and this was reflected in Debian. AMD64 became an official port for the next release while Motorola 68000 was shifted to unofficial. Debian 4.0 Etch was released on the 8th of April in 2007 with Linux kernel 2.6.18. This release offered support for encrypted disk partitions, graphical installation, and package integrity verification. This version was the first to offer the option to download installation media over bittorrent, the first to offer XFCE, and the first to ship the rebranded Mozilla packages from install. With AMD64 being a first class citizen, Debian also now offered the ability to run x86 binaries on x86-64 installations (via chroot).
Debian 5.0 Lenny was released on the 14th of February in 2009. This release supported SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, x86, AMD64, Itanium, PA-RISC, MIPS big and little, ARM (ARM and ARMel), and S/390. Netbooks were a popular platform around this time, using both Intel Atom and ARM, and this prompted the creation of tools to aid in making smaller packages for those platforms. These tools were named Emdebian. Lenny also now officially sanctioned four different desktop environments (though more were available in repositories): KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE. This version brought support for NTFS, Adobe Flash, CPU frequency scaling, and Java via OpenJDK (had long been available but not in the main package repo due to licensing) to Debian’s main branch. This release offered a Blu-ray disk image which allowed Debian to be installed from a single piece of media. A significant change for the Debian project as a whole came about with a move to semantic versioning. Updates to Lenny would be seen via numbers such as 5.0.2 with the final being 5.0.10 in 2012.
By 2010, the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu had improved some. Ubuntu was still getting ninety three percent of its software from a single upstream, Debian, and seventeen percent of those pieces of software had changes made to them that were specific to Ubuntu. For Ubuntu’s part, they began pushing their changes to upstream every six months. This effort often took the form of bug reports, patch submissions, and direct work with maintainers. All of this went a long way to calming the Debian developers, contributors, and fans. While initially the climate had been hostile with the perception of Canonical having stolen work, Ubuntu’s contributions transformed the relationship into one of more routine open source collaboration. As the Debian Project became more friendly with Ubuntu, the perception of Debian within Canonical transformed from one of fear into one of “contributing upstream is the right thing to do.”
Despite improvement, there were still some issues. Debian had once been the darling of the open source world, a highly polished, reliable, stable, secure, and flexible operating system developed without a single driving vision, without megacorp backing, and without a geographically centralized team. Its popularity had been eclipsed by its younger relative who was essentially being supported every step of the way by its elder. The popularity of Ubuntu during this time can’t really be overstated. Ubuntu had effectively become synonymous with desktop Linux for many. This still caused some mild discontent among the Debian Project’s members and fans, but it wasn’t quite the hot issue it had once been. To keep this progress of interaction going, Debian created the Derivatives Front Desk. This was a group of Debian project members who would help developers of derivatives contribute their changes back to Debian by mentoring them through Debian’s processes, getting them in touch with the correct people, discussing and establishing new processes for effort sharing where appropriate, and generally helping to facilitate communication and collaboration. Contact with the DFD was (and still is) possible via email and IRC.
Debian 6.0 Squeeze was released on the 6th of February in 2011 with Linux kernel 2.6.32. This time, Debian’s naming conventions for architectures had been formalized within the project, and those architectures it supported in version 6 were i386, amd64, powerpc, sparc, mips, mipsel, ia64, s390, and armel. Additionally, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port was now offered as a technology preview with kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. Version 6 also split non-free firmware into a separate repository outside of the main Debian branch. A fresh and vanilla installation of Debian would now include zero non-free software by default. Squeeze also moved Debian to a dependency-based init system allowing for parallel execution of system initialization scripts. Squeeze brought both ext4 and btrfs filesystems to Debian, while kFreeBSD brought ZFS. Floppy disks were dropped as install media, but Debian still allowed for Blu-ray, DVD, CD, USB disk, and network installations. Debian’s source packages took on a new format called quilt which separated patches from vanilla sources, allowed for the existence of multiple upstream source tarballs, brought in support for both bzip2 and LZMA compression, and allowed for the inclusion of binaries within the sources.
Debian’s popularity began growing quickly in the second half of 2012 following the release of Raspbian by Mike Thompson and Peter Green. This was an independent and unofficial port of Debian to the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi Foundation had no official operating system for the Pi at this time, but Raspbian was adopted and the Foundation released its own version on the 10th of September in 2013.
Debian 7 Wheezy was released on the 4th of May in 2013 with Linux kernel 3.2. This version ended semantic versioning by adopting a simpler major.minor versioning scheme in which the final version of 7 would be 7.11 on the 31st of May in 2018. This release saw true multi-architecture support (multiarch) be brought to Debian where the filesystem hierarchy was reorganized to allow for multiple library and header paths allowing software for different hardware architectures to be installed in parallel on a single system. This made cross compiling far easier to achieve, but it also allowed for better integration of x86 and AMD64 binaries and the ability to upgrade in place from x86 to AMD64. Wheezy also brought far better accessibility to Debian with support screen readers in the installation, and it brought deployment tools for private clouds as well. Multimedia codecs that had once required proprietary software were now included with open source versions of the encoders and decoders. UEFI support for AMD64 was added to Debian with version 7 though EFI support had already existed for Itanium. Wheezy was available for i386, amd64, powerpc, sparc, mips, mipsel, ia64, s390, s390x, armel, and armhf.
The Debian Project began a very long and rather heated debate in October of 2013 about its init system. A new software package called systemd had been developed by Lennart Poettering at Red Hat. This package included an init system that replaced System V init, a logging system that replaced syslog, a login system to replace both login and consolekit, and much more. It had legions of supporters and legions of haters, both of whom were extremely vocal. This system was in consideration as was Ubuntu’s Upstart with minority voices favoring SysVinit and OpenRC. The voices in favor of Upstart cited that it was simpler, easier to package, easier to migrate to, had a better community, and was more portable. The voices in favor of systemd argued that it had more features and would have a lower maintenance burden for Debian considering that it was supported by Red Hat. The vote came down to Upstart vs systemd with a four to four split in the technical committee. The committee chairman, Bdale Garbee, cast the tie breaking vote on the 11th of February in 2014 ending the debate in favor of systemd. Joey Hess, a long time Debian developer, left the project on the 7th of November in 2014. Many people blamed systemd for this, but that isn’t entirely accurate. The primary issue that he had was with how Debian was run, a problem that was brought to light for him by the systemd decision and not from systemd itself. From the debian-devel mailing list:
It's become abundantly clear that this is no longer the project I originally joined in 1996. We've made some good things, and I wish everyone well, but I'm out. Note that this also constitutes an orphaning as upstream of debhelper, alien, dpkg-repack, and debmirror. I will be making final orphaning uploads of other packages that are not team maintained, over the next couple of days, as bandwidth allows. If I have one regret from my 18 years in Debian, it's that when the Debian constitution was originally proposed, despite seeing it as dubious, I neglected to speak out against it. It's clear to me now that it's a toxic document, that has slowly but surely led Debian in very unhealthy directions. -- see shy jo
From his blog:
Debian used to be a lot better at that than it is now. This seems to have less to do with the size of the project, and more to do with the project having aged, ossified, and become comfortable with increasing layers of complexity around how it makes decisions. To the point that I no longer feel I can understand the decision-making process at all…
Other developers left explicitly due to systemd, and those individuals formed a Debian fork called Devuan which proudly refers to itself as a fork of Debian without systemd. Devuan is supported by the Dyne.org Foundation instead of SPI.
With all of the debate settled, resolutions and amendments made, and some personnel changes voluntarily made, Debian 8 Jessie was released on the 25th of April in 2015 with Linux kernel 3.16. Jessie supported i386, amd64, powerpc, ppc64el, mips, mipsel, s390x, armel, armhf, and arm64. UEFI support was added for i386 systems and support on amd64 systems was greatly improved. The release of Jessie also saw Debian’s sources become publicly browsable at source.debian.org.
By this time, some Canonical employees were now paid to work on Debian upstream packages full time rather than simply creating downstream Ubuntu packages. Additionally, Debian was made available on Microsoft Azure on the 2nd of December in 2015. In February of 2016, Mozilla and the Debian Project resolved their disputes over Mozilla’s software trademarks being used in the Debian distribution. Iceweasel would be Firefox and Icedove would be Thunderbird once again.
Debian 9 Stretch was released on the 17th of June in 2017 for amd64, i386, ppc64el, s390x, armel, armhf, arm64, mips, mipsel, and mips64el with Linux kernel 4.9. This release replaced MySQL with MariaDB, eliminated the requirement for X to run as root, introduced the dbg-sym repository for debug packages, brought UEFI support to live images, and brought pre-built OpenStack images for amd64 and arm64 hosts.
Debian 10 Buster was released on the 6th of July in 2019 with Linux kernel 4.19. This release increased the variety of officially supported desktop environments with Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, LXQT, MATE, and Xfce all making the list. Additionally, Wayland became the default display server for GNOME. AppArmor from Canonical was officially included in this release and enabled by default. The nf-tables Linux kernel subsystem was brought to Debian with version 10 and was included as iptables-nft with the more traditional packet filter becoming iptables-legacy. For those on i386 or amd64, secure boot was supported. Cups and cups-filters were installed by default, and network printing was able to be handled automatically in most environments.
Debian 11 Bullseye was released on the 6th of July in 2019 with Linux kernel 5.10 for amd64, i386, ppc64el, s390x, armel, armhf, arm64, mipsel, and mips64el. Version 11 was the first to include support for the exfat filesystem by default. This version also offered Fcitx 5 input in Wayland for improved east Asian language support.
On the 28th of May in 2020, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a beta of a 64 bit Debian image for the Raspberry Pi. This image was not based on Raspbian but rather the upstream Debian GNU/Linux packages for arm64. As a result, the name needed to change to indicate this transition, and the name Raspberry Pi OS was chosen. This name change carried into the 32 bit version as well despite that version continuing to be based upon the original Raspbian project. The first release of Raspberry Pi OS was made on the 2nd of February in 2022.
Debian 12 Bookworm was released on the 10th of June in 2023 with Linux kernel 6.1 for i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, mipsel, mips64el, ppc64el, and s390x. In this release, however, the minimum 32 bit x86 CPU was bumped to i686 compatibles (Pentium Pro and higher). Cloud images were made available for Amazon EC2 with amd64 and arm64, Microsoft Azure with amd64, OpenStack with amd64, arm64, and ppc64el, GenericCloud with arm64 and amd64, and NoCloud with amd64, arm64, and ppc64el. The GenericCloud image was intended for any virtualized environment, and the nocloud image was intended for testing build processes. Version 12 brought secure boot support to Debian running on arm64 with UEFI. The endorsed desktop environments for version 12 were Gnome, KDE, LXDE, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce. Additionally, a lot of effort was put into translating man pages in Debian providing complete coverage for a rather ridiculous number of human languages. The Debian Project also began separating non-free firmware packages into their own repository of non-free-firmware. A true full install of Debian 12 would use around 365GB of hard disk space for its sixty four thousand four hundred nineteen packages maintained by its global developer and contributor community. The Retro Millennial publication has a good write up of Debian 12.
Second only to Slackware, Debian is among the oldest surviving Linux distributions. It is developed openly much like the Linux kernel itself, and despite its challenges over the years, it continues to provide an excellent product that enables humans to easily use computing hardware of all types all over the world. With varying status ranging across dead, official, and unofficial Debian has been ported to DEC Alpha, ARM (both EABI and Hard Float), Atmel 32 bit RISC, HP PA-RISC, Intel i386, AMD64, Itanium, LoongArch (64 bit, little endian), Renesas M32 RISC, Motorola 68000, SGI MIPS (big endian), DEC MIPS (little endian), OpenRISC 1200, PowerPC, PowerPC SPE, IBM S/390, IBM zSeries, Sun SPARC, RISC-V 64, and Hitachi SuperH. Financially, Debian’s value has consistently been estimated to be over $1 billion.
This publication has readers from many of the companies whose history I cover, and many of you were present for time periods I cover. A few of you are mentioned by name in my articles. All corrections to the record are welcome; feel free to leave a comment.