K Desktop Environment 1
free software
K Desktop Environment 1 was the inaugural series of releases of the K Desktop Environment. There were two major releases in this series.
Pre-release
The development started right after Matthias Ettrich's announcement on 14th October 1996 to found the Kool Desktop Environment. The word Kool was dropped shortly afterward and the name became simply K Desktop Environment.
In the beginning, all components were released to the developer community separately without any coordinated timeframe throughout the overall project. First communication of KDE via mailing list, that was called kde@fiwi02.wiwi.uni-Tubingen.de.
The first coordinated release was Beta 1 on 20 October 1997 (1997-10-20) – almost exactly one year after the original announcement. Three additional Betas followed 23 November 1997 (1997-11-23), 1 February 1998 (1998-02-01), and 19 April 1998 (1998-04-19).
K Desktop Environment 1.0
On 12 July 1998 the finished version 1.0 of K Desktop Environments was released:
KDE is a network transparent, contemporary desktop environment for UNIX workstations. KDE seeks to fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar to the desktop environments found under the MacOS or Window95/NT [sic].
The public source identifies “K Desktop Environment 1” as free software. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Desktop, Environment and free.
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This entry incorporates text from “K Desktop Environment 1” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.