HISTORY

History of ERC development:
---------------------------

ERC was originally written by Alexander L. Belikoff (abel@bfr.co.il) and
Sergey Berezin (sergey.berezin@cs.cmu.edu).  They stopped development
around December 1999.  Their last released version was ERC 2.0.

In June 2001, Mario Lang (mlang@delysid.org) and Alex Schroeder (alex@gnu.org)
took over development and created a ERC Project at sourceforge.net.

In reaction to a mail about the new ERC development effort,
Sergey Berezin said, "First of all, I'm glad that my version of ERC is
being used out there.  The thing is, I do not have free time and
enough incentive anymore to work on ERC, so I would be happy if
you guys take over the project entirely."

So we happily hacked away on ERC, and soon after (September 2001)
released the next "stable" version, 2.1.

Most of the development of the new ERC happend on #emacs on
irc.openprojects.net.  Over time, many people contributed code, ideas,
bugfixes, and a lot of alpha/beta/gamma testing.

In 2005, Michael Olson (mwolson@gnu.org) became the release manager,
and later, the maintainer.  After some discussion between him and the
Emacs developers, it was decided to include ERC in Emacs.

With the release of ERC 5.1, ERC was included with Emacs 22.  It
became an official GNU project, and development moved to Savannah
(http://sv.gnu.org/projects/erc).

See the file CREDITS for a list of contributors.

P.S.: If one of the original developers of ERC reads this, we'd like to receive
additional information for this file and hear comments in general.