1.2. Discovering Blender's History

The Blender we know and love today wasn't always free and open source. It's actually pretty unique in that it's one of the few software applications that was "liberated" from proprietary control by its user community.

Originally, Blender was written as an internal production tool for an award-winning Dutch animation company called NeoGeo, founded by Blender's original (and still lead) developer, Ton Roosendaal. In the late 1990s, NeoGeo started making copies of Blender available for download from their Web site. Slowly but surely, interest grew in this less-than-2MB program. In 1998, Ton spun off a new company, Not a Number (NaN), to try to market and sell Blender as a software product. NaN still distributed a free version of Blender, but also offered an advanced version with more features for a small fee. There was strength in this strategy and by the end of 2000, there were well over 250,000 Blender users worldwide.