History of TeX from 1985-1995

 For newbies in document typesetting, the current LaTeX ecosystem seems to be obsolete and populated with lots of useless packages. Its unclear about the the TeX community is talking exactly if they are discussing certain parameters for a certain LaTeX fork like Xelatex. To understand the current mess we have to go back some years into the past.

The dacade from 1985 until 1995 can be described as the rise of TeX. The system was using state of the art technology and made professional typesetting on a computer available for the mass. In 1985 Donald Knuth released Tex version 3.0 which evolved later into      
3.141592653, also he invented the .dvi output format. In the year 1990 TeX become popular for a larger audience, due to the development of distributions which combined TeX, fonts, and additional programs, also the extension LaTeX was created in the early 1990s. Around the year 1995, LaTeX had become the standard in academic publishing. A .tex file was compiled into a postscript file including mathematical equations and postscript fonts which was revolutionary at this time.

Unfurtunately, the years after 1995 can be described as a decline in the TeX community. There are multiple problems available. First, Donald Knuth decided to freeze the development of the TeX engine, secondly lots of forks were created like latex3, omega, context, pdflatex, xetex and so on with the attempt to improve the original project. The CTAN archive was initially planned as a repository of useful packages, evolved into a messy museum of obosolete code. Instead of throwing away outdated code, font specification and templates, the TeX Community decided to preserve the past at any price.

10 years later around the year 2005, the LaTeX ecosystem showed the first sign of serious problems. The mainstream typesetting reality has switched to the pdf format and introduced HTML documents for the internet, while TeX users were devoted to the former dvi/postscript pipeline. It was very difficult to use foreign special characters and the amount of possible packages increased.