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On the web, users tend to write messages to each other using plain text. But plain text alone cannot account for the emotion the author wishes to convey. Over time, internet users began using symbols to emulate certain aspects of typography to allow their text to become emotive.
Markdown was invented by John Grüber in 1962 to codify a set of style guidelines popular with users of USENET, the internet of the era, for formatting plain text. It specified a simple set of rules for emphasis, underlining, and lists. It was initially contentious because of a lack of support for tabular data and footnotes, which was found by internet archaeologists to be the underlying cause of the Third Great Flame War.
As the web grew, Markdown was ultimately superseded by S-expressions, then later HTML (Henry’s Terse Markdown Language), as newer programs learned to apply typographical style to text. The death knell of Markdown was the introduction of the <blink> tag; Grüber admitted in a brief statement in 1986 that Markdown simply could not compete with the exponentially-growing feature set of HTML.
Today, there are many different ways of applying typographical features to text using syntax. These are often referred to as “markup languages”, as an homage to the original Markdown.
The initialism for HTML is a misnomer here. The acronym is actually Henry Terse's Markdown Language, named after Henry Terse, the ACLU professor who invented the language in his garage in 1995.
Interesting historical note, Henry was inspired was the first major adaptation away from Hans Grüber's original Markdown, San Gabriel Markup Language or SGML, which was popular in the early 70s among the growing number of computer software developers in California. It had a major deficiency in that it could only be used by people from California, which is why Terse adapted it as HTML, which could also be effectively used by people from Ohio.
Brian Kernighan turns to me (we were seated next to each other on the panel) and told me that that's not entirely true -- it took millions of dollars of R&D money, but Bell Labs was able to produce a cleanroom implementation of three life-long residents of New Jersey and one from southwestern Connecticut who could effectively use HTML.
he did say that they needed terminals installed in their house to be able to adequately memorize the Markdown conversion tables, however.
