[bowerbird]

markdown was _released_ 10 years ago, that's true.

but it's not entirely accurate to say it was "invented".

let me be more clear: markdown was _not_ "invented".

gruber was blogging with movable type, which was using the _textile_ light-markup system created by dean allen.

so he didn't even come up with the _idea_ himself!

of course, neither did allen. light-markup systems were _the_zeitgeist_ around the turn of the century:

* restructured-text was adopted for python documentation.

(.rst -wikipedia.org/wiki/restructuredtext -- david goodger)

* asciidoc had a big list of org-users. (still does.)

(asciidoc -- wikipedia.org/wiki/asciidoc -- stuart rackham)

* and there were other early entrants that are still alive.

(txt2tags -- wikipedia.org/wiki/txt2tags -- txt2tags team)

and dean allen's textile had a fairly solid reach by 2004:

* textile -- wikipedia.org/wiki/textpattern -- dean allen

* texy -- code.google.com/p/texy-- david grudl

* redcloth -- rubygems.org/gems/RedCloth/versions -- garber

* textpattern -- textpattern.com -- dean allen

but the first that i'd call "light markup" was "setext":

* 1992 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/setext -- ian feldman

"setext" was short for "structured e-text", and yes, that's why "restructured-text" put the "re" in front of its name, because they were "redoing" the structured-e-text of setext.

but even ian feldman would tell you (if you could find him) that he was merely leveraging the well-known conventions of the fledging internet at the time, such as usenet listserves.

"light-markup" is something that _the_masses_ "invented".

-bowerbird