The Computer History Museum (CHM), the world's leading institution exploring the history of computing and its impact on the human experience, today announced the public release and long-term preservation of the Eudora source code, one of the early successful email clients, as part of its Software History Center’s Historical Source Code Series. The release comes after a five-year negotiation with Qualcomm.
The first version of Eudora was created in the 1980s by Steve Dorner who was working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It took Dorner over a year to create the first version of Eudora, which had 50,000 lines of C code and ran only on the Apple Macintosh.
In 1991, Qualcomm licensed Eudora from the University of Illinois and distributed it free of charge. Qualcomm later released Eudora as a consumer product in 1993, and it quickly gained popularity. Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of users. After 15 years, in 2006, Qualcomm decided that Eudora was no longer consistent with their other major project lines, and they stopped development.
“In my opinion it was the finest email client ever written, and it has yet to be surpassed. I still use it today, but, alas, the last version of Eudora was released in 2006,” said Len Shustek, chairman of the Museum’s Board of Trustees. “With thanks to Qualcomm, we are pleased to release the Eudora source code for its historical interest.”
The discussion with Qualcomm for the release of the Eudora source code by the company’s museum took five years. Qualcomm has transferred ownership of the code, the Eudora trademarks, copyrights, and the Eudora domain names to the Computer History Museum. The transfer agreement allows CHM to publish the code under the very liberal BSD open source license, which means that anyone can use it for either personal or commercial purposes.
For download options and more information about the release of this historic source code, please visit: http://www.computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-source-code/
The Computer History Museum has the world’s most diverse archive of software and related material. The stories of software’s origins and impact on the world provide inspiration and lessons for the future to global audiences—including young coders and entrepreneurs. For other releases in the Museum’s historic source code series, please see: APPLE II DOS, IBM APL, Apple MacPaint and QuickDraw, Adobe Photoshop, Xerox Alto, Early CP/M, Microsoft Word for Windows Version 1.1 and MS-DOS.
The Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California, is the world's leading institution exploring the history of computing and its impact on the human experience. The Museum is home to the largest international collection of computing artifacts in the world, encompassing computer hardware, software, documentation, ephemera, photographs, and moving images. The Museum brings computer history to life through large-scale exhibits, an acclaimed speaker series, a dynamic website, docent-led tours, and an award-winning education program. For more information and updates, visit www.computerhistory.org.
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