History of PuTTY's development
2 days ago
- PuTTY began as a personal project (STel) in 1996 to address poor terminal emulation in Windows Telnet clients.
- In 1998, it was converted into a multi-protocol client with SSH-1 support and renamed PuTTY.
- First public release in 1999 with a single executable and no installer, manual, or zip file.
- Key features were added through community contributions: SCP (1999), X11 forwarding (2001), TCP port forwarding (2001), and Unicode support (2001).
- A manual was finally written in 2002.
- In 2002, the terminal emulator was ported to Linux, creating pterm and a full Linux version of PuTTY.
- Later major features include serial port support (2007) and connection sharing (2015), both requiring significant code restructuring.
- A server-side SSH refactoring in 2019 was done as a development tool, not for production use.
- Development was driven by 'dogfooding' (using the software personally) and community contributions, with little long-term planning.
- Serial port support was an exception: written by the original author due to user demand, despite lacking personal need.