It's difficult to produce a precise birth date for any piece of software, given that even its initial versions tend to take shape slowly over a period of weeks.

But according to my diary archives, it was exactly five years ago today that PuTTY, or STel as I was still calling it at the time, made its first ever successful SSH connection. So I'm going to declare this to be its birthday, simply because it's a milestone I happen to be able to place accurately.

It's been an eventful five years. In that time, PuTTY itself has gone from being alpha software which I gave copies of to my friends on a ‘don't distribute this too widely until it works a little better’ basis, through being beta software I was just about happy enough with to release publicly, to its current state of fame where it's the first thing you get if you google for ‘Windows SSH client’ and it brings me in more mail than I can sensibly answer. It's attracted a steady stream of small donations, the occasional offer of consulting work, and it's even managed to recruit itself an administrative staff. I'm still nominally in charge of it, but every so often I wonder if it isn't now in charge of me :-)

So, happy birthday PuTTY! I'd say ‘may the next five years be as successful’, but I have a nasty feeling it would actually take over the world if they were…