The Beginning

Pidgin was originally created in November of 1998 by Mark Spencer. He called it GAIM as it was a GTK AOL Instant Messenger client. Mark started it because he wanted to learn how to create graphical applications for Linux and thought it was important to be connected to people with the relatively new concept of chat. He used the public TOC Protocol to connect to AIM.

At the time, Mark was running a business name Linux Support Services which helped customers with their Linux systems. This experience made it easy for Mark to setup the hosting for the GAIM project as popular code hosting sites like SourceForge were still a year away.

Mark setup CVS for source code management; an FTP for releasing new versions of the project; and the project's website which was designed by Jeramey Crawford.

Early on, Jim Ducheck joined the project and very quickly took over development responsibilties.