Sudo and its alternatives
Sudo is a ubiquitous tool for running commands with the privileges of another user on Unix-like operating systems. Over the past decade or so, some alternatives have been developed; the base system of OpenBSD now comes with doas instead, sudo-rs is a subset of sudo reimplemented in Rust, and, somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft also recently announced its own Sudo for Windows. Each of these offers a different approach to the task of providing limited privileges to unprivileged users.
The origins of sudo go back to the beginning of the 1980s and 4.1BSD running at the State University of New York, Buffalo. The full history of the program will not be repeated here, but a nice overview of it is available on the sudo website. That history is sparse on details about the first release of "CU sudo", which is the currently prevailing sudo; it simply says that it was CU sudo version 1.3 that was released in 1994. The exact date appears to have been February 9, 1994 from a post to comp.unix.admin — just a bit over 30 years ago.
Sudo has been through multiple iterations and reimplementations over the years. CU sudo was named after the University of Colorado, where it was created by Todd C. Miller. He still maintains it, although naturally many people have contributed to it over the decades. The "CU" prefix was dropped from the name in 1999.