Pandoc has just turned 20, and if you want to know how a Philosophy Professor came to write the most successful Haskell software in history, read the story here:
In the crusty recesses of my mind, there was thing thing called Scrivener gold, but my episodic memory couldn’t define if this was just imaginings or real, and I certainly couldn’t put my finger on when it was. Thanks to @pigfender who posted the archive link to the Scrivener Gold page, dated October 20th 2006:
So we ain’t too far away from Scrivener’s 20th either…
The installer works fine. You are of course running it on a 32-bit computer, preferably running at least Mac OS X Leopard? If not, might be time to upgrade!
Thanks for posting a link to that article! I knew Pandoc came out around the same time as Scrivener, but not that close. This forum archive goes back to June 2006[1], but the very first beta version of it was uploaded in August 2006, when the very first Pandoc beta (alpha?) was uploaded. I was completely unaware of it at the time (no surprise given the lack of promotion back then). I had only encountered MultiMarkdown, a tool with a similar goal of giving authors wanting to use Markdown for something other than web pages, an option. So that’s what Scrivener 1.0 went with.
The pre-Scrivener builds that became “Gold” were all discussed on a different forum which has become lost to time. ↩︎
For the record, the first beta of Scrivener was made available to brave volunteers in November 2005 (via the NaNoWriMo forums). The whole thing was then rewritten for Scrivener 1 over the next year, with that original beta being released for free as Scrivener Gold.
Scrivener 1.0 was released on 20th January 2007, so the official 20th will be in January 2027. (Wow that makes me feel old.)
Ah, I remember those days, or as well as someone my age remembers anything. To borrow a good line from Mark Twain, “I can’t remember what I was doing last week but I can remember everything about my childhood whether it happened or not.”
I stumbled onto that first beta of Scrivener when Word was transforming from the fairly crafty writing tool I’d used since floppy-disc days into a smarmy corporate enabling device. Among the contestants was something called Jer’s Novel Writer, but its possibilities seemed hampered by, among other things, a non-serious name. As I was feeling a bit Bartleby back then, Scrivener it was.
By the time Keith finally consented to accept actual Money for a 1.0 I’d been editing a national magazine for more than a year using a beta written by some dude clacking away in his bedroom in Cornwall. Even now, as an official Emeritus who makes occasional guest appearances to relieve the pressure and improve the cash flow, Scrivener remains the only serious tool in my box.
