2023-08-27 - Project Gemini history section added

As I previously mentioned I was planning to, today I've added a new section to the official Project Gemini capsule, documenting the project's history:

Project Gemini history

The old list of the first 50 public Gemini severs which used to be linked to from the capsule's main page has now been moved into the history section. Naturally, there are redirects in place from the old URL to the new one.

It's nice to have the broad history of the project outlined, with dates for major milestones, especially for people only learning about Gemini today. But my main motivation for doing this was to compensate, to some extent, for the recent FAQ rewrite recasting the project's goals and motivations to present what we ended up with in a language accessible to the people most likely to read it today. To achieve this, I have rehosted all the old posts I made in my Gemini "side phlog" in the days before either the mailing list or the official capsule. These posts make repeated reference to the earliest framings of our design criteria, and clearly show which things we were and weren't thinking about much in the early days.

I still intend for the project history section of this capsule to eventually include a Gemini-accessible archive of the old mailing list, but one isn't present yet in this first incarnation. Stay tuned!