Thunderbird Time Machine: A Look Back At Thunderbird 0.1
Let’s take a walk down memory lane to the summer of 2003. Cinemas are dominated by sequels like Iron Man 3 and Fast & Furious 6. Linkin Park, 50 Cent, and Evanescence have top-selling new albums. Apple’s iPod hasn’t even sold 1 million units. Mozilla’s brand new web browser is still called Firebird. And a new cross-platform, open-source application called Thunderbird has debuted from the foundations of Mozilla Mail…
Because the entirety of Thunderbird’s releases and corresponding release notes have been preserved, I’ve started a self-guided tour of Thunderbird’s history. Why? A mixture of personal and technical curiosity. I used Thunderbird for a couple years in the mid-2000s, and again more recently, but there are giant gaps in my experience. So I’m revisiting every single major version to discover the nuances between releases; the changes big and small.
(If you ever get the craving to do the same, I’ve found the easiest operating system to use is Windows, preferably inside a virtual machine. Early versions of Thunderbird for Macs were built for PowerPC architecture, while early Linux versions were 32-bit only. Both may cause you headaches with modern PC hardware!)
