How Berlin became Fresco

Once upon a time, we were known as "The Berlin Project" (or "The Berlin Consortium"), and the windowing system we were writing was known as "Berlin". As of November 2002, though, this changed, and this page describes why.

First, stare at this table for a bit to get familiar with the new names:

"Fresco" replaces "The Berlin Project" -- if you see references to Berlin elsewhere, then usually they should be replaced with references to Fresco. References to "The Berlin Consortium" can be replaced with "fresco.org" except when reading history books.

So why switch? Well, there's some history there. The name "Fresco" predates our project by some time; Fresco was originally an experimental GUI system that a number of very smart people spent a lot of time designing (see our readings page for some of the papers). That project eventually died off, but they left behind a remarkably clean and well-designed architecture. In the meantime, the Berlin project had been formed, and after a few years of false starts, we decided to borrow Fresco's architecture wholesale. Since then, a few important things happened:

• We discovered that the old trademark on Fresco had expired
• The last maintainers of the old code base gave us their archives and blessing
• we managed to get the fresco.org domain name ;-)

The change has several minor advantages and one major one:

• Much less confusing as a name (especially since we get to toss out the always-confused "Warsaw" at the same time)
• Much easier to search for
• Shorter, easier to remember hostname
• Most importantly, because it's just the right thing to do -- our design *is* Fresco, and has nothing to do with the original goals of the "Berlin project". Vintage Fresco was an incredible system, well ahead of its time, and we're proud to carry the name forward.