# 10 year anniversary! 🎉 **URL:** \ **Category:** Announcements\ **Created:** [January 28, 2022, 3:14pm UTC](https://community.info-beamer.com/t/10-year-anniversary/1093 "2022-01-28T15:14:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![infobeamer-fw](https://community.info-beamer.com/user_avatar/community.info-beamer.com/infobeamer-fw/32/3_2.png) [@infobeamer-fw](https://community.info-beamer.com/u/infobeamer-fw)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2022, 3:14pm UTC](https://community.info-beamer.com/t/10-year-anniversary/1093/1 "2022-01-28T15:14:30Z")
On **January 29th 2022** , the “info-beamer project” is **10 years old**. When [I started info-beamer in 2012](https://github.com/dividuum/info-beamer/commit/870b4cc6930afd18ddf5cc37c88136d02be90311), I never imagined that it would be a serious business and in use all over the world 10 years later. After all, info-beamer was started as a for-fun project for a [small conference](https://entropia.de/GPN) in my hometown Karlsruhe. We have a yearly hacker meetup and I was volunteering together with my (now) wife to provide information to visitors about when the next talk starts, what’s going on on twitter and other semi-relevant information on a projector (called a “beamer” in German). Here’s the email asking whether or not I was interested in running the “infobeamer” aka the projector showing such information: ![image](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/a12a39c76bb519bcf8fc7c273d4ba8e2ca68654d.png) Translated: > Do you want to operate the infobeamer at the gpn this year? with announcements of presentations and anything else you can think of that might be fun? > > […] and i had already asked […wife…], if she would like to run the info-team together with you (that would be infobeamer and something like paper-timetables etc.) - that would be great! My response: > Yes. […wife…] and I want to do this. 🙂 I wanted to have a way to change content without starting the player software and modifying everything in real-time and didn’t really find anything to do that. So I began coding in January 2012. Here’s the [very first bits of code](https://github.com/dividuum/info-beamer/commit/870b4cc6930afd18ddf5cc37c88136d02be90311) I wrote just two days after the above email exchange. And a photo from the event in June of 2012 with the software running on a public display the first time: ![7368345308_b93b376aa7_k](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/e4953ee097ec37018f226e33d05d2e92036919dd.jpeg) ([Image](https://www.flickr.com/photos/cheatha/7368345308/in/album-72157630059569227/) by [Flo Köhler](https://www.flickr.com/photos/cheatha/) CC BY 2.0) The white canvas on the right is showing info-beamer content. Here’s a close-up picture of content shown: ![7368196338_799046f6a0_k](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/11c1270268456604c2ffc8c2cde3fc9199de0514.jpeg) ([Image](https://www.flickr.com/photos/cheatha/7368196338/in/album-72157630059569227/) by [Flo Köhler](https://www.flickr.com/photos/cheatha/) CC BY 2.0) Back then, info-beamer was still running on a normal beefy desktop PC. People at the conference enjoyed the content and I was running similar setups at other conferences. In February 2012 (so one month after starting work on the info-beamer software) the very first Pi was released. At some point people started asking if info-beamer would run on the Raspberry Pi as well: ![image](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/3d35c4b2a0dbb201cc5d57d6fdd51f096596e222.png) Later that day I ordered a Pi and [tweeted about it](https://twitter.com/dividuum/status/253196515407958016): ![image](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/b65ffd3a85cbcb35a50120af41dee14f8cca83be.png) A bit later (around January of 2013) a first version, including hardware video acceleration, was working. You can check out the old video showing a [demo of this on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LZ3SkmxsY): [![](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/8c50197e72cf80e1cda0762caa9b6b4643b06d83.jpeg "info-beamer on Raspberry PI [2x shaders + 2x hw accelerated video decoding]") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LZ3SkmxsY) I was freelancing at the time and decided to sell info-beamer for the Pi as a commercial program online to see if people were willing to pay for it. Here’s the very [first website](https://web.archive.org/web/20130211060630/http://info-beamer.org/pi/) offering the Pi version to the world: ![image](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/b527409c8b7394334f853bffcd297595a59d0393.jpeg) Running this version required in-depth technical skills as you have to setup your own Linux system and then implement a mechanism to distribute content to it. Seeing the general interest in a Raspberry Pi based digital signage solution I made this decision to see how this could be made easier. Preferably in a way to still retains all the flexibility of standalone software, but with a nice web UI for people that just need to get things done and rightfully don’t care exactly how everything works. The operating system (info-beamer OS) was started in late 2013 while website development started early 2014. Here’s the very first internally working, but very empty, website version: ![image](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/983f97124a52f8ab28dfeaefde339314a2fe2d92.png) And a screenshot from one of the first public releases in late 2014: ![image](https://community.info-beamer.com/uploads/default/original/1X/6c596ba97669090cd4ca801bf927bdbff965361a.jpeg) Since then info-beamer has been growing constantly, had 12 major OS releases and countless website and feature improvements. Thanks for using [info-beamer.com](http://info-beamer.com) and on to the next 10 years 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![infobeamer-fw](https://community.info-beamer.com/user_avatar/community.info-beamer.com/infobeamer-fw/32/3_2.png) [@infobeamer-fw](https://community.info-beamer.com/u/infobeamer-fw)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2022, 2:01pm UTC](https://community.info-beamer.com/t/10-year-anniversary/1093/2 "2022-01-29T14:01:04Z")
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**Author:** ![linus.penzlien](https://community.info-beamer.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v3/letter/l/c89c15/32.png) [@linus.penzlien](https://community.info-beamer.com/u/linus.penzlien)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2022, 10:04am UTC](https://community.info-beamer.com/t/10-year-anniversary/1093/3 "2022-06-09T10:04:57Z")
Congratulations for staying strong for the last 10 years! Very impressive how far infobeamer has come since then. Keep it up 🙂