Some notes on Frontier's history

According to a posting on Dave Winer’s Scripting News, Frontier is 18 years old as of April 2006. For a detailed history on the early days of Frontier, you might want to read History of Frontier.

One comment we’ve often heard (usually by proponents of the next, best thing) is that Frontier is old, therefore it’s obsolete technology. We wanted to spend a moment debunking this assertion.

Although it might seem that older software is obsolete software, that’s not really true. What makes a product obsolete is if it’s no longer being updated and maintained. In fact, programs that have been around for a long time and are actively maintained are among the most solid and most advanced products you might use. Some programs take a considerable amount of effort and time to evolve to meet users’ needs and this takes time.

In Dave Winer’s History of Frontier, he tells us he began development in 1988. Now, in 2006, Frontier is at version 10. There are other very popular, very solid, and certainly very modern programs that began life about the same time as Frontier:

• C dates back to the 70s, C++ the early 80s
• IBM’s Lotus Notes, now in Release 7, began development in 1985 and Notes 1 was released by Lotus in 1989
• Microsoft Office was released as early as 1989 (that’s the earliest reference we’ve found, might have been earlier)
• Adobe’s Photoshop was first released in 1990

All of these programs have had a long life. Like Frontier, detractors have claimed Lotus Notes dead every year since about 1994 and it’s very heavily entrenched, very popular, and shows no sign of slowing down. Whether or not you’re one of the folks who dislikes Microsoft, there’s no debate that both Photoshop and Office are stronger now than they ever were.

So, when you’re looking at Frontier, which is now an open source project with active development, don’t think old, think seasoned.