History,

History,

Bob Amstadt (the initial project leader) and Eric Youngdale started the Wine project in 1993 as a way to run Windows applications on Linux. It was inspired by two Sun Microsystems' products, the Wabi for the Solaris operating system, and the Public Windows Initiative[10] (an attempt to get the Windows API fully reimplemented in the public domain as an ISO standard, but rejected by the entity due to pressure from Microsoft in 1996).[11] Wine originally targeted Windows 3.x (16-bit) application software, but as of 2010 focuses on 32-bit and 64-bit applications. The project originated in discussions on Usenet in comp.os.linux in June 1993.[12] Alexandre Julliard has led the project since 1994. 

Wine officially entered beta with version 0.9 on 25 October 2005.[16] Version 1.0 was released on 17 June 2008,[17] after 15 years of development. Version 1.2 was released on 16 July 2010.[18] Development versions are released roughly every two weeks. Version 1.4 was released on 7 March 2012.[19] The 1.4 release provides many improvements, such as the following (as quoted from the Wine HQ website)[19]: "This release represents 20 months of development effort and over 16,000 individual changes. The main highlights are the new DIB graphics engine, a redesigned audio stack, and full support for bidirectional text and character shaping. It also contains a lot of improvements across the board, as well as support for many new applications, notably Microsoft Office 2010."