So who builds this thing? Where does it come from? What’s the history?
Today, Urbit is built and maintained by three organizations, a community of contributors and core developers, infrastructure (star) operators, and governance (galaxy) node owners.
Let’s talk first about these individual groups within the Urbit community, then about the history of the project and how it came to be.
Organizations
There are currently three principal organizations involved in Urbit’s development and maintenance: Tlon, Urbit.live and the Urbit Foundation.
Tlon has been around since 2013 or so, and is primarily focussed on the development of Urbit OS and its user experience. Urbit.live was started in 2018 to make the on ramp into Urbit as easy as possible. Both companies contribute regularly to the code base.
Tlon was originally granted about half of the Urbit ID address space, and has used that to fund its operations so far. Over time, Tlon plans to offer hosting and services to make using Urbit as easy as possible.
Urbit.live started selling Urbit IDs very early once that became possible, and also plans to offer services within the Urbit ecosystem.
The Urbit Foundation was formally established in 2021. The Foundation runs the grants program, maintains urbit.org, the network explorer, and organizes Urbit events like Assembly.
The community of contributors and core developers has been steadily contributing to the code base since before Tlon existed, and they’re still going strong. They can primarily be found on Urbit itself, in the Urbit Community (~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community), the urbit-dev mailing list and on GitHub.
Timeline
At the beginning, Urbit was just a few people with the right combination of imagination and discipline to try to rebuild computing.
2002
Urbit starts as an open-ended personal project. An “independent study PhD” to reinvent computing for a network-centric world.
2008
Nock, the foundation of Urbit, works. Coming in at 32 lines of code, that’s 1 line of code every two months.
2012
Hoon, Urbit’s programming language, compiles itself to Nock. Writing Hoon is much easier than writing Nock.
2013
Arvo, Urbit’s OS kernel, boots and the first live Urbit network is started with a command-line chat.
2014
Tlon is founded to help support Urbit development (and is < 8 people for the next four years).
2015
Urbit has its first web interface and serves its own website.
2016
The first sale of Urbit address space sells out in four hours.
2017
Our test network runs for ten months without a reboot.
Our private sale, shared only with our mailing list, sells out in six hours — limit two per person.
2018
Tlon sells about 8% of its stake in the network to accelerate Urbit development. urbit.live gets going and starts selling Urbit IDs to the public.
2019
Tlon spends the year stabilizing Arvo and building Landscape.
2021
Tlon hosts the first Urbit Assembly and the Urbit Foundation is formally organized.
Building Urbit is about building a future where technology doesn’t control us. Instead, we look forward to a future where technology is simpler, more reliable and less invasive.