rockbox/docs/HISTORY

Rockbox History

* Dec 2001

  Bj<42>rn Stenberg set up and announced the mailing list for Archos Open Source
  Jukebox software hacking dicsussions. People started to join up. The
  scrambling algorithm was "broken" and the first ever LED-flashing program
  was downloaded and run.

  Lots of efforts were put on researching the hardware, how it works, what
  circuits that are used, where to find the spec sheets for those circuits
  etc.

  By the end of the month, the first working LCD-code for the Recorder was
  written.

  148 mails was posted to the list.

* Jan 2002

  Initial source packages were offered that did basic things like scrolling
  or blinking on the screen.

  A vote page was setup for people to vote on a project name, and even while
  Rockbox was not the winning one, Bj<42>rn showed his dictator-side and set the
  project name. Rockbox it shall be.

  Discussions about development environments.

  The issue of locked hard disks were discussed a lot, since Bj<42>rn got this
  problem on a whole range of his disks!

  More hardware pins and functionality was detected and researched.

  At the end of the month, Rockbox was setup as a project on sourceforge.net
  and people immediately started posting feature-requests.

  187 mails was posted to the list.

* Feb 2002

  Linus Nielsen Feltzing did some major progress on his gdb-stub and
  associated hardware modification to do really low-level debugging.

  Lots of feature-requests were posted.

  47 mails was posted to the list.

* Mar 2002

  Robert Hak suggested we start maintaining a FAQ, and took an initiative
  to start the #rockbox IRC channel.

  Daniel started the work on the simulator.

  Initial code was added to the CVS.

  72 mails was posted to the list.

* Apr 2002

  UI-wise functionality is getting written, as by the help of the simulator we
  write code even though the lower levels aren't quite there yet.

  April 19th. Bj<42>rn, Linus, Daniel and Kjell gathered at the "Rockbox
  Developer Conference 2002" at Linus' place and drew up a basic design of the
  Rockbox software.

  Julien Labruy<75>re donated a slightly broken Archos Jukebox 6000 to the
  project.

  70 mails was posted to the list.

* May 2002

  Introducing our cool playlist concept.

  May 3rd. We have sound. Rockbox was able to produce sound for the first time
  ever. The 4 seconds of music was the beginning of "Arcade" by Machinae
  Supremacy.

  The FAT32 driver is working! We can access the file system.

  The dir browser could run on a Player. The ATA code still didn't work on the
  Recorder.

  May 28th. We start offering "daily builds" on the Rockbox web site.

  103 mails was posted to the list.

* Jun 2002

  June 2nd. Rockbox 1.0 (for players only) is released.

  The WPS concept was introduced.

  June 19th. Working Archos Recorder mp3 playback was announced to the list.

  June 19th. Rockbox 1.1 was released.

  355 mails was posted to the list.

* Jul 2002

  430 mails was posted to the list.

* Aug 2002

  August 9th. Rockbox 1.2 was released.

  August 28th. Rockbox 1.3 was released.

  1199 mails was posted to the list.

* Sep 2002

  ROLO was introduced.

  Multiple-language support was added.

  1375 mails was posted to the list.

* Oct 2002

  October 11th. Rockbox 1.4 was release.

  831 mails was posted to the list.

* Nov 2002

  On Nov 10th, Linus announced the first recording code committed to CVS and
  made available to users.

* Dec 2002

  On Dec 19th, Bj<42>rn posted the first ever test version for the FM Recorder.
  Didn't work much...

* Jan 2003.

  The FM version starts to work properly in the end of January.

* Feb 2003

  Matthew P. O'Reilly donated an FM Recorder to Linus. Linus had it for 2
  hours before he took it apart and started drawing schematics...

  The FM version of Rockbox hits the daily builds on February 17th.

* Apr 2003

  The April 1st joke, Doom on Archos, heated up the community.

  On April 15th, the long awaited Rockbox 2.0 was released. Works fine on
  Players, Recorders as well as FM Recorders (but without FM tuner support).

  Daniel started editing and publishing the Rockbox Digest.

  368 subscribers of the development mailing list.
  1349 mails was posted to the list by 181 authors.

* May 2003

  On May 3rd, Linus committed the first code ever that made use of the FM
  tuner on the FM model.

* June 2003

  On June 29th, Bj<42>rn committed the first plugin interface and things, and
  now Rockbox runs plugins.

* July 2003

  On July 9th, J<>rg Hohensohn announced the first official release of Rockbox
  in flash! It only works on the Recorders and the FM Recorders.

* December 2003

  Rockbox 2.1 is released

* March 2004

  Rockbox 2.2 is released

  J<>rg Hohensohn introduces the voice concept that now allows Rockbox to talk
  (speak) the menus and more.

* May 2004

  We finally dump Sourceforge's CVS repository and host it ourselves.

* July 2004

  We start providing Windows installer packages

  Jens made it possible to run Rockbox entirely from ROM, thus making another
  150-170KB free for mp3 buffering.

* September 2004

  Jens and J<>rg started porting Rockbox to the Archos Ondio, Archos' flash
  memory based player series.

  The work on a iRiver port starts for real. We buy one working and one broken
  one to the project. Another article (about the porting) appears on slashdot.

  September 24: rockbox.org is ours thanks to Jeff!