Blender is 25 years old

January 2nd marked the 25th birthday of Blender, which was first conceived by Ton Roosendaal during the Christmas holidays of 1993.  A mere year later in 1994, the first release was running and the birth date of January 2 is defined by a backup found on Ton’s machine at the time. In fact, the curious can still download this primitive version from the Blender website. 

15 months after this date the software was used as in internal tool at the animation studio NeoGeo in the Netherlands, and following this the first publicly available freeware release went online January 1 1998. The source code became available under an open source license on October 13th 2002, marking the start of the free and  open source 3D app we know Blender as today. 

A short retrospective video published by the Blender Foundation looks at Blenders history and shows the software’s progression. Watch it on YouTube.