To już dziesięć lat

10 lat – w świecie informatyki to cała wieczność. Dekadę temu jeszcze pokazywał się Bajtek, PeCety dopiero torowały sobię drogę do naszych domów, w których jeszcze królowały ośmiobitowce… Tymczasem Philip Zimmermann w swoim mailu przypomniał, że od momentu wypuszczenia pierwszej wersji programu PGP minęło równo 10 lat. Czy pamiętacie sprawę z dochodzeniem przeciw niemu? A przecież kod zródłowy był oznaczony jako US ONLY… T o również dzięki PGP Stany Zjednoczony zmieniły swoje prawo eksportowe… A teraz mamy Gnu PGP 😉

Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 17:26:41 -0700  From: Philip Zimmermann   Subject: PGP Marks 10th Anniversary    Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of PGP 1.0.    It was on this day in 1991 that I sent the first release of PGP to a  couple of my friends for uploading to the Internet.  First, I sent it  to Allan Hoeltje, who posted it to Peacenet, an ISP that specialized  in grassroots political organizations, mainly in the peace movement.   Peacenet was accessible to political activists all over the world.   Then, I uploaded it to Kelly Goen, who proceeded to upload it to a  Usenet newsgroup that specialized in distributing source code.  At my  request, he marked the Usenet posting as "US only".  Kelly also  uploaded it to many BBS systems around the country.  I don't recall  if the postings to the Internet began on June 5th or 6th.    It may be surprising to some that back in 1991, I did not yet know  enough about Usenet newsgroups to realize that a "US only" tag was  merely an advisory tag that had little real effect on how Usenet  propagated newsgroup postings.  I thought it actually controlled how  Usenet routed the posting.  But back then, I had no clue how to post  anything on a newsgroup, and didn't even have a clear idea what a  newsgroup was.    It was a hard road to get to the release of PGP.  I missed five  mortgage payments developing the software in the first half of 1991.   To add to the stress, a week before PGP's first release, I discovered  the existence of another email encryption standard called Privacy  Enhanced Mail (PEM), which was backed by several big companies, as  well as RSA Data Security.  I didn't like PEM's design, for several  reasons.  PEM used 56-bit DES to encrypt messages, which I did not  regards as strong cryptography.  Also, PEM absolutely required every  message to be signed, and revealed the signature outside the  encryption envelope, so that the message did not have to be decrypted  to reveal who signed it.  Nonetheless, I was distressed to learn of  the existence of PEM only one week before PGP's release.  How could I  be so out of touch to fail to notice something as important as PEM?   I guess I just had my head down too long, writing code.  I fully  expected PEM to crush PGP, and even briefly considered not releasing  PGP, since it might be futile in the face of PEM and its powerful  backers.  But I decided to press ahead, since I had come this far  already, and besides, I knew that my design was better aligned with  protecting the privacy of users.    After releasing PGP, I immediately diverted my attention back to  consulting work, to try to get caught up on my mortgage payments.  I  thought I could just release PGP 1.0 for MSDOS, and leave it alone  for awhile, and let people play with it.  I thought I could get back  to it later, at my leisure.  Little did I realize what a feeding  frenzy PGP would set off.  Apparently, there was a lot of pent-up  demand for a tool like this.  Volunteers from around the world were  clamoring to help me port it to other platforms, add enhancements,  and generally promote it.  I did have to go back to work on paying  gigs, but PGP continued to demand my time, pulled along by public  enthusiasm.    I assembled a team of volunteer engineers from around the world.   They ported PGP to almost every platform (except for the Mac, which  turned out to be harder).  They translated PGP into foreign  languages.  And I started designing the PGP trust model, which I did  not have time to finish in the first release.  Fifteen months later,  in September 1992, we released PGP 2.0, for MSDOS, several flavors of  Unix, Commodore Amiga, Atari, and maybe a few other platforms, and in  about ten foreign languages.  PGP 2.0 had the now-famous PGP trust  model, essentially in its present form.    It was shortly after PGP 2.0's release that US Customs took an  interest in the case.  Little did they realize that they would help  propel PGP's popularity, helping to ignite a controversy that would  eventually lead to the demise of the US export restrictions on strong  cryptography.    Today, PGP remains just about the only way anyone encrypts their  email.  And now there are a dozen companies developing products that  use the OpenPGP standard, all members of the OpenPGP Alliance, at  http://www.openpgp.org.    What a decade it has been.    -Philip Zimmermann   5 June 2001   Burlingame, California   http://www.philzimmermann.com  

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