1. History

Python was created in the early 1990s by Guido Van Rossum at the CWI (National Research Center) in the Netherlands as part of the Amoeba project, a distributed operating system in need of a scripting language. Guido had previously been part of the team developing the ABC language in the same laboratory, and Python was strongly inspired by it.

Python was then made public, becoming free software in 2000 (version 1.6.1) and evolving to its current version 2.5. Its future is still managed by Guido, surrounded by a team of contributors, and its interests protected by the Python Software Foundation, the association created in 2001 and which owns the language.