A Brief History of FAI, Which Began 25 Years Ago
Quoting: Happy Birthday FAI! —
Some months before, the computer science department of the University of Cologne bought a small HPC cluster with 16 nodes (each with dual CPU Pentium II 400Mhz, 256 MB RAM) and I was too lazy to install those nodes manually. That's why I started the FAI project. With FAI you can install computers in a few minutes from scratch to a machine with a custom configuration that is ready to go for their users.
At that time Debian 2.1 aka slink was using kernel 2.0.36 and it was the first release using apt. Many things have happened since then.
In the beginning we wrote the first technical report about FAI and a lot of documentation were added afterwards. I gave more than 45 talks about FAI all over the world. Over the past 25 years, there has been an average of more than one commit per day to the FAI software repository.
Several top500.org HPC clusters were built using FAI and many companies are using FAI for their IT infrastructure or deploying Linux on their products using FAI. An overview of users can be found here.
Some major milestones of FAI are listed in the blog post of the 20th anniversary.